Secrets of the Bible People 0940793164, 9780940793163

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I

SECRETS OF THE BIBLE PEOPLE KAMAL SALIBI

K A M A L SALIBI

SECRETS OF T H E BIBLE PEOPLE

SAQI

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication D ata A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 86356 546 8 © Kamal Salibi, 1988 & 2004 First published 1988 by Saqi Books This edition published 2004 by Saqi Books

SAQI

26 Westbourne Grove L ondon W 2 5RH www.saqibooks.com

C ontents List of Maps Key to Hebrew and Arabic Transliteration Common Consonantal Transformations Preface Introduction: Defining the Objective 1. Did Adam Exist? 2. The Mystery of Noah 3. The Tower of Babel 4. The Abrams Who Were Not Abraham 5. The Secret of the House of Abraham 6. Joseph and his Egypt 7. The Wandering Aramean 8. The Search for the Historical Moses 9. The Man who Saw It Happen 10. A Prophet from Oman Appendix: Geography of the Exodus Index

6 7 8 9 21 27 45 63 75 95 107 127 139 163 177 191 197

Maps The Middle East Today Setting of the Eden Myths The Noah Migration The Migration ‘From the East’ The Geography of thejoseph Story Wandering Arameans The Exodus and Wanderings of the Hebrew Israelites in West Arabia Geography of the Book of Jonah

20 28 46 64 108 128 140 178

K e y to H e b r e w and A rab ic T ransliteration H ebrew

Arabic

T echn ica l

A l te r n a t iv e

T ra n s liter a tio n

T ra nsliteratio n

’ (glottal stop)

N «(

mm

n

J

a

E a a

3

Ja

J (* u O" t

UK

j A O" L>“

3

u«» a

q tj. j

Cf

vjd

u O ^ ll

j

j E

I)

A

a Jo,

L>=» t

g (Arabic g) d h w h (voiceless pharyngeal fricative) t (t as in ‘toy’)

’ (omitted at beginning of words) b j (in Arabic) d h w z h

y

y

k 1 m n s (as in ‘see’) ‘ (voiced pharyngeal fricative) p (Arabic p)

k

s (as in ‘saw’) q (voiceless uvular stop) r s (sh as in ‘sheep’) s (as in ‘see’) t (as in ‘tea’) t (th as in ‘thaw’) h (voiceless uvular fricative) d (th as in ‘them’) z (voiced alveolar fricative) d (voiced alveolar stop) g (voiced uvular fricative)

m n s

p or f (Hebrew) f (Arabic) s q

r sh s t th kh dh ?, dh d,dh gh

C o m m o n C onson an tal T ran sform a tion s Hebrew ’ (glottal stop)

A ra b ic

w; y

g d h (as fem inine suffix)

g; q

w z

’ (glottal stop); y d; s; z; d

h t

h

y

’ (glottal stop); w

k m n

d; z t (no rm ally silent)

t

q n m s; s; so m e tim e s z

‘ (voiced p h ary n g eal fricative)

g

s

d; z; z; so m e tim es s

q

s

g; g ; k s; t

s t

s; so m e tim e s s t; s; t

Note: In rep ro d u c in g A rab ic nam es co nsonantally, I have n o rm a lly o m itte d the transliteration o f th e fem in in e suffix, and also the se m i-v o w els w and y w h e re they feature on ly as vo w els. In so m e cases, h o w e v er, these A rab ic characters have been transliterated for closer c o m p a riso n b etw e en the A rab ic an d Biblical fo rm s o f the sam e nam e. In T he Bible Came from Arabia, 1 transliterated the H e b re w D as s, and the as s, the c o m m o n practice b eing the reverse. I have k e p t m y o w n u n o rth o d o x transliteration o f the tw o characters in th e p re sen t b o o k fo r consistency.

Preface

As such a vital part o f the heritage o f the modern world, the Hebrew Bible deserves to be properly understood. This is why, during the last tw o centuries, it has been the subject o f extensive critical study by Christian and Jewish scholars, m any o f them practising believers o f deep religious conviction, eager to understand the origins o f their faith. A t the hands o f these scholars, the Hebrew text o f the Bible has been subjected to thorough investigation, and various theories concerning the composition o f its different parts have been advanced. A ttem pts were also made to study the Bible texts in the light o f history in order to gain a better understanding o f their narrative, devotional and doctrinal contents. Where the stories o f the Bible are concerned it is today generally conceded that some involve chronicled or telescoped history, while others are only tangentially historical, preserving a rich fund o f ancient m yth and legend — the body of im mem orial lore which forms the pagan background o f Judaism and ultimately o f Christianity. To this extent the present book, wdiich examines some o f the better know n Bible stories, is in the tradition o f m odern Biblical criticism, but w ith one im portant difference. While Biblical scholars today generally adhere to the traditional belief that the land o f the H ebrew Bible was Palestine, the present book proceeds on the assumption that this land was actually in peninsular Arabia. This concept o f Biblical geography is not entirely new. A num ber o f references to Arabia in the Bible texts are so obvious that they can hardly pass unnoticed. It has always been known, for example, that

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the Biblical land o f Sheba is present-day Yemen, and that the valley o f Hadramut, which lies there, still carries the name o f Biblical Hazermaveth in an Arabicized form. It has long been speculated that the Y emen could have been the original Arabian setting o f the Biblical story ofjob. In the nineteenth century many scholars were convinced that Arabia was much m ore closely connected w ith the Bible than was com monly thought. These scholars had read early Arabic literature where a num ber o f intriguing references to the Israelites as an ancient West Arabian people are to be found. In 1864 the great orientalist Reinhart Dozy published a book called The Israelites o f Mecca in David’s Time, in which he suggested that the lost Israelite tribe o f Simeon was already firmly established in the West Arabian land o f the Hijaz by King D avid’s time. Even before the time o f Dozy, there was widespread conviction am ong scholars that the Biblical Israelites were originally Arabian desert tribes w ho later came to settle in Palestine. Today Biblical scholars scoff at the idea that the H ebrew Bible could have had m uch connection w ith Arabia beyond the undeniable fact that the ancient Israelites had a certain familiarity w ith the peninsula. When I first came forward w ith the proposition that the West Arabian highlands, rather than Palestine, were the original land o f the Bible and the setting o f its entire history ( The Bible Came from Arabia , London, Jonathan Cape, 1985; Pan Books, 1987), m y w ork was condemned, in the w w d s o f Professor George Mendenhall, formerly o f the U niversity o f Michigan, as ‘a quixotic absurdity that cannot be taken seriously’, and ‘an extreme example o f the misuse o f specialized learning, based on nineteenth-century ideas that have long ago been proved false’. Yet were these ideas ever really proved false? And if so, how? M oreover, w hat if some m ajor archaeological discovery, in Arabia or in Palestine, should one day prove these ideas — and m y ow n, m ore extreme thesis — to be correct? In the field o f learning, as I see it, there is no orthodoxy and heresy, but only the search, involving reasoned conjecture tested against evidence. U ntil such time as proper evidence is brought to prove beyond doubt that Biblical history ran its course in Palestine, I shall continue to search for it in Arabia, not because I w ant it to be there, but because I remain fully convinced by reason and evidence that its dramas were played out there. Hence I venture to write a new book on the subject. Tim e may ultimately prove my thesis

10

Preface

correct in its essence and perhaps even in most o f its details, or it may prove to be entirely w rong. If it turns out to be correct, then m any an accepted concept o f the ancient history o f the N ear East will have to undergo a radical change. If the thesis turns out to be incorrect, it will still have served a useful purpose: that o f stirring m odern scholarship in the field to rethink its basic position — an exercise which is always in order. The plain fact is that in our ow n century Biblical scholars and historians o f the ancient Near East have come to form a closed circle which resents unsolicited intrusions into the field. They have built an edifice based on foundations which are, in m ost cases, assumptions w hich they attempt to pass for facts, while refusing any radical re-examination o f the subject matter. To any attem pt at such re-examination, they react in anger, defending the edifice they have constructed and turned into a citadel and hurling condemnations at their critics from its ramparts. This does not imply that all their theories and hypotheses are necessarily incorrect. In the final analysis they may turn out to be right on many counts. H ow ever, their insecurity in the citadel, where they have chosen to lock themselves, is param ount, as they refuse to accept in good grace external challenges which may be right or wrong. For readers w ho have not read m y previous book, The Bible Came from Arabia, it w ould be useful to summarize its thesis here. While undertaking an etymological study o f Arabian place names, I was struck by w hat seemed to be a high concentration o f Biblical place names in the West Arabian territory o f Asir bordering the Red Sea, between the city o f T aif and northern Yemen. U pon closer scrutiny, I discovered that the coordinates o f the towns and villages in the area bearing Biblical names conform to a stunning degree to the coordinates given to the places m entioned by the same names in the Bible — a far more telling fact than the actual existence o f the names. When I w ent back to the massive body of scholarly literature on Biblical geography to check m y findings against it, I found this literature more confusing than illuminating. First, after m ore than a century o f research, scholars have only found a handful o f Biblical place names which actually survive in a recognizable form in Palestine. Second, many o f the Palestinian places which have come to be know n by Biblical names have been given these names, either anciently or recently, by itinerant pilgrims, or by scholars or archaeologists w ho took them, on no conclusive evidence, to be

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Secrets o f the Bible People

Biblical sites. Third, in nearly all cases, the coordinates o f the places which actually carry Biblical names in Palestine do not conform to the coordinates given to the places by the same names in the Bible, although they do in Arabia. Fourth, Biblical scholars have doubted the historicity o f many events related by the Bible because they cannot easily be fitted into the geography o f Palestine. Fifth, 110 one has yet found the slightest trace o f an ancient H ebrew or Israelite presence in Egypt, and scholars remain in disagreement as to when, and by what route, the Israelites made their exodus out o f Egypt, ultimately to reach Palestine. There also exists a host o f other problems o f Biblical geography about which scholars continue to argue, pitting one aw kw ard hypothesis against another, but refusing to accept any suggestions from outside their closed circle. The one factor that appears to have united these scholars, since 1985, has been m y ow n suggestion that the Bible need not have come from Palestine at all, and that one m ight seriously entertain the possibility that its origin is West Arabian. So far most scholars w ho have publicly expressed opinions about this suggestion have haughtily dismissed it as ‘worthless rubbish and nonsense from beginning to end’, often w ithout further comment. A m ong those w ho cared to explain w hy they thought my suggestion about the relocation o f Biblical geography to be absurd, a num ber o f arguments were presented. First, some said that place names alone are not sufficient evidence to establish where Biblical history ran its course. I was not just guided by place names, but also by comparative coordinates, and furthermore, I took matters o f topography, natural resources, flora and fauna, along w ith other matters into consideration, yet all this was invariably slurred over. Some scholars remarked that, going by place names alone, one might relocate the Bible land almost anywhere in the N ear East, because o f the strong similarity between the different Semitic languages from which place names in that part o f the w orld are derived. Because this criticism was made by Biblical scholars o f recognized eminence, there were m any w ho accepted it. Before he could have read a w ord o f my book, Professor James Sauer o f the University o f Pennsylvania, president o f the American Schools o f Oriental Research, permitted himself to announce to the w orld through the pages o f Newsweek that, going by m y method, one could demonstrate that Israelite history had its geographical setting in Kenya, and that the Biblical

12

Preface

Jerusalem was actually Nairobi. This statement was made in September 1984, m ore than a year before m y book was first published. W hat Professor Sauer and others who argued against the validity o f my m ethod were unaware o f was the fact that I had done m y hom ew ork carefully on this point. Before daring to consider my thesis about the West Arabian origin of the Bible, let alone advance it, I had examined the map o f every part of the Near East in detail to determine w hether or not I could find any concentrations o f Biblical place names, no matter how small, in areas other than West Arabia, until I was completely satisfied that there were none. O utside West Arabia the only territory in which I could find an appreciable, though small, concentration o f Biblical place names, but w ith coordinates that do not fit Biblical accounts, was Palestine. If Professor Sauer seriously believes that going by place names, he can make a case for relocating the Biblical Jerusalem in Nairobi, there is nothing to prevent him from trying. Second, there were m any critics w ho pointed out that the parallels I draw between the place names mentioned in the Bible and those that survive in West Arabia are frequently not valid. John Day, editor o f the Oxford Bible Atlas, apart from generally condemning them as ‘total nonsense’, declared them to be ‘inadmissible on philological grounds’. There were those w ho maintained, for example, that I make too much o f metathesis — the change in the order o f consonants in a given w ord, w hereby a name such as H erm on (hrmn) could become H em ron (hmrn ). M y critics here, granting that they are experts in the Semitic languages, were simply dishonest, because they must know better; their aim was to confuse non-specialists on a technicality w ith w hich only a specialist would be familiar. I will cite here the simplest example o f metathesis between Biblical H ebrew and m odern Arabic. In Biblical H ebrew the w ord for ‘w ith’ is ‘m (vocalized as ‘am). In Arabic, it is m' (vocalized as mo'). All one has to do is go through an etymological dictionary o f Biblical Hebrew to discover the countless cases in which metathesis is involved in the consonantal structure o f w ords having the same meanings, or related meanings, between the different Semitic languages. M oreover, it is because metathesis is a generally acknowledged phenom enon o f com parative and diachronic linguistics that the tech­ nical term for it exists. Centuries before modern western scholars called it ‘metathesis’, the Arabic dictionaries had labelled it istibdal.

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Secrets o f the Bible People

Also taking advantage o f the unfamiliarity o f non-specialist readers with Semitic linguistics, a num ber o f m y critics cast doubts on the comparisons I made between Biblical and m odern Arabian place names in which changes o f consonants are involved. These have been done according to a pattern o f consonantal changes between the different Semitic languages, and between different dialects o f the same language (see table preceding Preface). The validity o f such changes has always been accepted by scholars in the field. Again, the standard etymological dictionaries o f Biblical H ebrew are replete w ith examples o f such consonantal changes between one Semitic language and another in the same w ord. Here also, m y critics were plainly dishonest. For example, they accept, w ithout batting an eyelid, the identification o f the Biblical Bethel (byt 7) w ith the modern Palestinian village o f Beitin (bytn ), and o f the Biblical Gibeon (gb‘n) with the m odern Palestinian village ofal-Jib (gb), although the change o f the H ebrew I into the Arabic n to turn Bethel into Beitin is not a com monly attested consonantal change between H ebrew and Arabic, and the name o f al-Jib actually lacks tw o consonants that are found in the name Gibeon. In my ow n studies, I identify Bethel as the West Arabian Batilah (btl) or Butaylah (btyl ), and Gibeon as the West Arabian Jib ‘an [gb'ti), whose names, in their Biblical and modern Arabic forms, are absolutely identical in consonantal structure. O n the other hand, where I do recognize consonantal changes, as in the case o f the Biblical Cush (kws) being the m odern West Arabian Kuthah ( k w t ), I follow the rules ofconsonantal changes between H ebrew and Arabic which m y most ardent critics are bound to recognize as eminently valid. W hy they make a point o f not recognizing these generally accepted rules in the case o f my w ork is a matter which I leave for them to explain, if they can. In the small m inority o f cases w here I do make comparisons between Biblical and Arabian place names which do not strictly follow the accepted rules regarding consonantal change, I am careful to point out that such comparisons are no more than guesses subject to recon­ sideration. M y predecessors in the field, w ho identified Bethel w ith the Palestinian Beitin, and Gibeon w ith the Palestinian al-Jib, pre­ sented their identifications, which are linguistically untenable on more than one count, as definitive and beyond doubt. O ne o f the first critics to attack m y book in the press, shortly after its publication, was T ud or Parfitt, lecturer in H ebrew at the

14

Preface

School o f Oriental and African Studies o f the University o f London. In an article politically entitled ‘T he hijacking o f Israel’, which he w rote for the Sunday Times, Parfitt dismissed m y w ork as utterly w orthless on a num ber o f grounds — among others that I treated Biblical H ebrew as a dead language w hose texts have to be deciphered afresh, whereas Hebrew', he claims, has been in continuous existence as a living language from Biblical times to the present day. This criticism was echoed from Cam bridge University by no less eminent a scholar than Regius Professor John Emerton in the pages o f the Guardian. The implication o f this criticism was that I had no reason to doubt the validity o f the traditional, or Masoretic, vocalization o f the Bible texts, arguing that the Jewish scholars called the Masoretes, w ho undertook the vocalization o f the consonantal H ebrew o f the Bible in Palestine and Iraq between the sixth and tenth centuries AD, were people to w hom Hebrew was a language o f religious scholarship and not one o f common daily speech. As it happens, I am far from being the person who actually discovered that Biblical Hebrew ceased to be a language o f day to day speech long before the time o f the Masoretes. Any article on the history of the H ebrew language in any standard encyclopaedia will say as much. The normal estimate is that H ebrew ceased to be a living language in about the third century BC. I w ould say that the death o f H ebrew as a spoken language occurred a century or tw o earlier, but I w ould not split hairs on this point. As for the doubts about the Masoretic vocalization o f the Bible texts, they have existed since the earliest days o f Biblical criticism, w hen it was suggested, for example, that the ‘ravens’ that brought bread and meat every m orning and evening to the prophet Elijah, while he was hiding in the wilderness, could not really have been ‘ravens’ (' rbym, vocalized by the Masoretes to read ‘orbim) but Arabs (' rbym, revocalized to read ‘arbun) from the nearby desert. It has been standard practice since then for scholars engaged in the textual criticism o f the Bible to doubt the Masoretic vocalization o f problematical Biblical w ords and phrases now and then. W hat I do is go all the way and read the H ebrew Bible in its unvocalized text, paying no regard to the Masoretic vocalization, in order to discover w hat sense I can make out o f it by myself, before turning to find out w hat sense the Masoretes had made of it. I simply carry to its logical conclusion w hat scholars have been doing for nearly tw o

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centuries. In most cases my ow n reading o f the Bible turns out to be no different from that o f the Masoretes. In a num ber o f cases, however, it does turn out to be radically different, and I explain in detail the reasons. If Em erton, Parfltt and others disagree w ith me, where I disagree w ith the Masoretes, they w ould also have to go into detailed explanation, in which case they m ight convince me of m y errors o f Biblical interpretation. If they choose to make sweeping condemnations o f my Biblical readings, w ithout bothering to explain their reasons, I shall take it that they have none. Then there is the question o f archaeology. M y critics have generally maintained that the case for Palestine being the true land o f the Bible has been fully proven on this basis. Professor James Sauer was emphatic on this point: ‘Archaeologists have come up w ith incontrovertible evidence in the ground that H ebron and Jerusalem are where the Bible says [sic] that they are.’ As I pointed out in The Bible Came from Arabia, there are a num ber o f serious archaeologists and other scholars w ho disagree, and w ho have expressed unequivocal opinions on this matter. The fact that jar handles have been found in some Palestinian sites bearing Canaanite inscriptions that say hnlk hbrn (read to mean ‘to the King o f H ebron’), and such like, prove nothing — certainly nothing conclusive. One m ight for instance ask w ho was the Biblical King o f H ebron in question. M oreover, one m ight read Imlk hbrn, for example, to mean ‘for the ownership o f H ebron’ (an attested personal name) rather than ‘to the King o f H ebron’, especially as jars o f ordinary earthemvare are hardly w orthy o f dedication to a king. Granted, archaeological excavations in West Arabia are needed to provide more conclusive p ro o f or disproof o f m y thesis that the land o f the H ebrew Bible was in fact there. Archaeologically, however, the case for Palestine, after decades o f intense excavation, remains completely unproven, and, moreover, the comparative toponymical evidence is far m ore against than for it. Biblical archaeologists are hardly ready to admit this, but there are scientific archaeologists w ho do so. In doubting the validity o f Biblical archaeology to date, I am satisfied that I am in good company. Let me set the record straight: I do not pretend in any way that m y ow n findings in the field o f Biblical geography and general Biblical study are, beyond doubt, the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. O n the other hand, I do maintain that they

16

Preface

are findings whose possible validity must be seriously considered rather than hastily accepted, or even m ore hastily dismissed. I arrived at these findings by following a m ethod which I described in detail in the second chapter o f The Bible Came from Arabia. M y critics, in anger rather than in reason, have dismissed my method as a non­ method. Yet by pursuing this method, I have arrived at conclusions which have a distinct advantage over the standing propositions of m odern ‘Bible Science’: they provide an explanation o f Biblical geography which facilitates rather than complicates the understand­ ing o f the H ebrew Bible as history. Some of my ardent critics, in their more reflective m om ents, have admitted this. Therefore, I shall venture to present interested readers w ith this second book o f Bible studies, which I hope they will find more readable than the first, where the m ore tedious technicalities o f geography and linguistics had to be covered. In ending this preface I m ust acknowledge the assistance o f four people w ho helped me in m y w ork: John M unro o f the American University o f Beirut, w ho edited the first draft o f the completed text; Leila Salibi and M argo M atta, w ho made the first typescripts o f it; and Josephine Zananiri, w ho edited the book in its final form before it was sent to press. Kamal Salibi Amman, 24 April 1987

SECRETS OF THE BIBLE PEOPLE

Introduction D efin in g the Objective

In my earlier book, The Bible Came from Arabia, I argued largely, but not entirely, on the basis o f place names that the true land of the Hebrew Bible (to Christians the O ld Testament) was not Palestine, but the southern Hijaz and Asir in West Arabia. Hostile critics have pronounced m y argum ent o f the case as worthless rubbish on the grounds that the archaeology and palaeography o f Palestine have already proved beyond doubt that the history o f the Biblical Israelites was enacted there. A num ber o f specialists express strong reservations about the truth o f this claim. Where my own theory of the West Arabian geography o f the Bible is concerned, I admit that it still needs to be substantiated by archaeological excavation. O n the other hand the fact that hundreds o f Biblical place names survive in West Arabia, whereas barely a handful are to be found in Palestine cannot be lightly dismissed. A nother m atter that commands even more serious attention is the fact that the geographical coordinates, which the H ebrew Bible gives to places whose names happen to survive in both areas, invariably apply to West Arabia and not to Palestine. In the present book I shall examine some w ell-know n Bible stories w ith tw o aims in view: first, to put m y new theory o f Biblical geography to further test, and to introduce certain corrections; second, to reappraise the content o f these Bible stories when examined in the light o f w hat I contend is their true Arabian setting. If you have a Bible near you while you read this book, it will help; all the better if you can read the Bible in Hebrew, although this is

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not vital. Where I think the English Bible mistranslates the original, I will point out the error, and give w hat I believe to be a more accurate reading o f the original Hebrew. If you do not mind reading seventeenth-century English, I w ould recom mend the Authorized Version (AV) rather than the Revised Standard Version (RSV), or other m odern translations. The old translators took fewer liberties in translation, particularly in the rendering o f place names. In The Bible Came from Arabia, I pointed out that the Hebrew Bible, as we know it, may be considered an accurate version o f the Jewish scriptures as they were put together in about 500 BC; certainly before 300 BC. W hat is not always accurate, however, is the vocalization o f the H ebrew Bible text, which was carried out about a thousand years later by the Palestinian and M esopotam ian Masoretes (sixth to tenth centuries AD) — Jewish scholars whose spoken language was Aramaic, or m ore likely Arabic, rather than Hebrew. By the m ost conservative estimate, Hebrew, by that time, had not existed as a language o f ordinary speech since the third century BC. Any standard encyclopaedia article on the subject will support this view. In Hebrew, as in Arabic, there are no real vowels in the alphabet, and vocalization can only be indicated by vowel signs. With different vocalizations, words spelled in the same way can yield widely different meanings. W hen I read m y Arabic newspaper every morning, I have to vocalize the unvowelled words in the columns in m y mind, as I read them, according to the context. W hen I read the H ebrew Bible, I discount the Masoretic vocalization and do the same thing; then I turn to find out w hat sense the Masoretes had made o f the same text. In m ost cases I find they were correct. In many cases, however, they were not as correct, and sometimes they were plainly wrong. In no way can I claim that it was I w ho first discovered that the Masoretic vocalization o f the H ebrew Bible can often be misleading. This fact has been know n since the earliest days o f m odern Biblical criticism. O ne w ell-know n example, already alluded to in the Preface, comes from the story o f the ‘ravens’ that ‘brought... bread and flesh in the morning, and bread and flesh in the evening’ to the prophet Elijah while he was hiding him self near the brook o f Cherith (1 Kings 17:6). In vocalizing the original H ebrew o f this story, the Masoretes rendered the w ord ‘rbym as ‘orbim, which produced the meaning ‘ravens’. H ad they rendered it as ‘arbim, as some Biblical

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Introduction: Defining the Objective

scholars have suggested, it w ould have m eant ‘Arabs’, which makes better sense. Another example comes from one o f the best-known Psalms (23:4). Here the Masoretes vocalized the w ord slmwt to read sal-maweth, which means ‘the shadow o f death’. T o some Biblical scholars a more plausible vocalization o f the same w ord would have been salamoth, meaning ‘darknesses’. Hence the ‘valley o f the shadow o f death’ o f which this psalm speaks could have simply been the ‘valley o f darknesses’. The literature o f m odern Biblical criticism is replete with other examples o f passages o f Biblical text, where the Masoretic vocalization o f the original H ebrew has been seriously doubted. I simply go a step further than m y predecessors in the field, discounting the Masoretic vocalization o f any Biblical text I examine as a matter o f principle, assuming that it could be w rong until I can establish the degree to which it is correct. In the present book, therefore, I shall proceed on tw o assumptions: first, that Biblical geography belongs in West Arabia, not Palestine; second, that the Bible ought to be read afresh in the original Hebrew w ithout regard to the Masoretic vocalization which was introduced to its text much later. In this light I shall examine the m ore familiar stories told in the Torah or Pentateuch — the first five books o f the canonical Hebrew Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, N um bers and Deuteronomy). I shall also examine the story o fjo n ah which is told in the book o f Jonah. First, how ever, there are some technicalities to explain to those readers w ho are not specialists. The texts I shall examine have been thoroughly studied and restudied before, and m uch o f w hat I have to say about them is not new. In the field called ‘Bible Science’, one m ust distinguish between the remarkable w ork carried out since the last century by scholars w ho have concentrated on the textual analysis o f the Hebrew Bible; the often ingenious w ork o f others w ho have tried to evaluate the Bible as history, even in the context o f w hat I contend is the w rong geography; and the w ork o f Biblical archaeologists, w ho continually announce discoveries o f w hat they claim are Biblical sites and Biblically relevant inscriptions and records in Palestine and other parts o f the Near East. Some Biblical scholars have taken the w ork o f these archaeologists seriously; others less so. M y ow n conviction is that the case o f Biblical archaeology, as it stands today, remains completely unproven, despite all claims to the contrary. Let us consider, however, the highly im portant insights which

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Secrets o f the Bible People

the textual criticism o f the Bible has yielded, relating to the books whose narrative contents we shall subsequently examine. Regarding the book o f Jonah, it is believed that the text comes from a time after the fall o f Jerusalem in 586 BC. Estimates o f the period w hen it could have been w ritten vary between 500 and 350, even 250 BC. O n the five books o f the Torah, textual criticism has m uch more to say, and learned opinion varies. There is general agreement, however, that certainly three o f these five books — Genesis, Exodus and N um bers — are redactions from older texts or sources, com monly called ‘traditions’. These traditions can be distinguished from one another, in the standing text o f the Torah, by differences in vocabulary, style and content. The main ones are considered to be the following: 1. The Yah wist tradition, called J (from the German spelling o f Y ahweh, which is comparable to the English Jehovah). This tradition is readily recognizable in the Torah texts from its reference to the God o f the Bible by name as Yahweh (Hebrew yhwh, usually rendered in English translation as ‘the Lord’). The Yahwist in the Torah is a master story-teller w ith a compact and forceful style all his own. Scholars have distinguished between different Yahwist or J traditions from some variations in style. 2. The Elohist or E tradition, which refers to God as Elohim (Hebrew ’Ihym, meaning ‘G od’). Again, the Elohist tradition (or perhaps traditions) is a narrative one, though somewhat more reflective. While the Yahweh o f J is anthropom orphic and behaves like a hum an being, the Elohim or ‘G od’ o f E is m ore transcendental. To describe passages w here the Elohist tradition is not clearly distinguishable from the Yahwist, the term JE is used. In the Torah, the J and E traditions are discernible in Genesis, Exodus and N umbers, but not in Leviticus or D euteronom y. 3. The Priestly or P tradition is marked by its concern w ith detailed genealogies and ritual instruction, which do not feature in the mainly narrative J and E traditions. It is generally considered that the P author or authors were the ones w ho put together the J and E materials in Genesis, Exodus and N um bers for the first time, probably in the seventh century BC, along w ith the P additions to these texts. Subsequent redactions o f the unified text are attributed to a Redactor or Redactors called R. Like E, P generally refers to God

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Introduction: Defining the Objective

as Elohim. The book o f Leviticus, which has no narrative content, is considered to be a P text. 4. Standing in a class by itself in the Torah is the book o f Deuteronomy, whose authorship is attributed to the so-called Deuteronomist or D tradition — like P a priestly tradition, but o f a later school. The style o f D is marked by injunction, and its content emphasizes the status o f Israel as Y ahw eh’s chosen people. Apart from the book o f Deuteronom y, which forms part o f the Torah, the books o f Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings are also attributed to the D tradition or school and considered ‘Deuteronom ic history’. There are other theories regarding the composition o f the text o f the Torah which challenge the docum entary theory summarized above. Some o f these theories dwell on literary forms; others on the assumption that oral traditions preceded the w ritten traditions; yet others on the findings o f Biblical archaeology and palaeography. O n the whole, however, the theory described above makes good sense, and most scholars accept at least its basis as a useful w orking principle, although they m ight split hairs w ith some o f the finer details. Personally, I maintain that there is enough truth in the theory to make it impossible to ignore it. The same, to m y mind, is true of form criticism, which distinguishes between the different literary forms in the Torah texts — tribal legends, religious myths, cultic laws and rites, and so on. I make these distinctions in m y present study, though mostly in m y ow n way. I am also convinced that there is much oral tradition o f im mem orial antiquity behind the text o f the Torah, which the master story-tellers o f Genesis, Exodus and N um bers picked up and w ove into their yarns. As for archaeological criticism, I consider it invalid. M y opinion in this instance can hardly be otherwise, since I am convinced that Biblical archaeology has searched and continues to search for Biblical history in the w rong places. In the chapters that follow, I shall go into some analysis o f the following Torah stories: from Genesis, the stories o f Adam and Eve, Noah, the T ow er o f Babel, the Patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob), and Joseph; from Exodus and N um bers, the story o f Moses, and from the latter book, the story o f Balaam. Rather than confuse the reader w ith abstruse references to J, E, P, R and D sources and traditions, I shall simply take the stories as they appear in the Bible

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Secrets o f the Bible People

texts and make some preliminary analysis o f their content in the light o f what I assume to be the Arabian geography o f the Bible. M y analysis will not be exhaustive; in some cases, as in the studies o f the stories o f Jacob and Moses, it will barely scratch the surface. It is not m y intent to demolish one ‘Bible tru th ’, only to put another in its place. Where one cannot arrive at certainty, however, one can always guess: advance a hypothesis, experiment w ith it, and ultimately find out to w hat extent it stands up to evidence and reason. This, after all, is exactly w hat the scientific m ethod is all about. What I shall attempt, in short, is an investigation o f some wellknow n Bible stories, no more no less. I shall examine the original Hebrew text o f each story to determine exactly w hat it indicates. Where I detect m ore than one narrative strand in the same story, I shall disentangle them and study them separately, each against what I shall estimate to be its proper geographic setting in Arabia. Where it will be necessary for me to have recourse to linguistics, I shall try to do so w ith economy: enough to dem onstrate to the specialist w hat I mean; not so much as to clutter the text o f the book at every point w ith transliterated H ebrew and Arabic. W herever possible I shall have the linguistic explanations in parentheses, so that non­ specialist readers can skip them if they wish. In relating the story o f the historical Moses and the exodus, I have relegated the more detailed geographical reconstruction o f the wanderings o f the Israelites in Arabia to an appendix, where the interested reader may find it. O ne thing is certain: the Bible stories which I shall examine in this book have been examined m any times before on the accepted but unproven assumption that their setting was in Palestine and the northern lands o f the N ear East. There they yielded none o f their secrets, perhaps because the land is alien. W ould they be coaxed to yield their secrets in Arabia, if Arabia is their true land? D o they make better sense there? Readers may judge for themselves.

26

1 D id A dam Exist?

Legend is not history, yet its fabric is w oven from the same yarn. While history is factual, often to the point o f being dull, legend is fanciful and engaging. In its imagery, peoples, nations, tribes, countries and towns are, m ore often than not, transformed into men and women, gods and goddesses. Political alliances become personal friendships; tribal and regional confederations m ould into marriages; migrations become voyages o f adventure; colonies, sons and daughters; political and economic conflicts and wars seethe into quarrels over points o f personal and family honour. Nevertheless, legend, in its ow n way, serves the same purpose as history: it attempts to explain how particular social realities came about; and this is what distinguishes legend from pure fiction. In fiction the names o f the characters are usually invented; the story is intended to entertain and, in some cases, to edify, and no pretence is made to the contrary. In legend, however, the names o f characters are real, although the characters themselves may be territories or communities — and in some instances civilizations, cults or institutions — rather than persons. While in fiction the geography o f the story as well as the characters may be pure invention, in legend, as in history, geography has to be real; otherwise the legend cannot serve its purpose. In myths, as in legends, geography is factual as well. While legends, however, are fanciful history, m yths are fanciful speculation o f a philosophical rather than historical nature, which seek to explain basic questions such as the origin o f the world; o f mankind and hum an behaviour; o f society and the social order. In the Hebrew

27

Did Adam Exist?

Bible many o f the stories told are strictly historical, and some are legends or myths, but I have still not found a single one which is fiction. In the book o f Genesis we have a particularly varied collection o f myths and legends whose antiquity antedates their w ritten form by many centuries. D uring this long interval many generations o f story­ tellers m ust have embellished this lore w ith additional touches o f fancy, fusing different myths and legends together and sometimes merging different characters. Biblical scholars hold different views on h ow the book o f Genesis was actually compiled and at w hat time. O n one point, however, they agree: Genesis is an anthology o f stories from different sources or traditions, and the existing text o f this anthology was clearly rewritten in the final stage by an editor — the Redactor, as Biblical scholars call him. I shall leave aside the question o f the literary composition o f Genesis as m y concern in this chapter lies elsewhere: the story o f Adam and his family, which is the first story the book relates. Regardless o f how this story was originally collated, then redacted, one thing is certain; it is composed o f at least three different strains: First, the story o f ‘the m an’ (Hebrew h-’dm, vocalized ha-adam, w ith the definite article) personifying mankind, w ho was created by the Biblical God Yahweh and placed in the garden o f Eden, then expelled from it for his disobedience (Genesis 2:7-3:24). Second, the passing mention o f ‘the m an’ (h-’dm, again w ith the definite article) who features in the story o f the primeval brothers Cain and Abel as their unnamed father (4:1). Third, the reference to the m an actually called Adam (’dm, vocalized adam, w ithout the definite article) who was the father o f Seth (4:25) and the ancestor o f Seth’s descendants (5:1). The Genesis text nowhere specifically says that ‘the m an’ o f the Eden story and ‘the m an’ w ho was the father o f Cain and Abel were the same person: nor does it identify ‘the m an’ in either case as the person w ho was actually called Adam, and who was the father o f Seth. The way the three stories are narrated in succession, w ith some deft interpolation here and there, simply leaves us w ith the impression that ‘the m an’ o f the first tw o stories and the Adam o f the third story were one and the same person, whose wife was called Eve (actually mentioned by name only twice, 3:20, 4:1, in both cases as the wife o f ‘the man’, not o f Adam). Thus, we are left to conclude

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that what is involved is one story about the first hum an family whose head was called Adam, the ancestor o f all mankind. The fact that the Hebrew w ord adam, meaning ‘m an’, is identical w ith Adam as the name o f the father o f Seth plays a fundamental role in fusing the three stories into one. U pon closer scrutiny we discover that the composite Genesis story o f Adam and his family is a fusion o f not only three, but o f at least four different stories, each o f them originally independent o f the others. First, the m yth about the creation o f man and his fall, presented as the story o f the first ‘m an’ (h-’dm or h -’y s ) and the first ‘w om an’ (h-’sh) (2:7-3:24). This is followed by another m yth illustrating the origin o f hum an conflict, presented as the story o f the brothers Cain and Abel (4:2-16). Then there is a legend about the origins o f a people called the Cain (4:17-24), followed by another legend about the origins o f a people called the Seth (4:25-5:32). While the story o f the first ‘m an’ and the first ‘w om an’ is set in the garden o f Eden, the other three stories (if indeed there are only three) are set elsewhere. Assuming that there are only four stories in question, we might turn to examine them one by one. T he Eden m y th In The Bible Came from Arabia, I devoted a chapter to the question of the garden o f Eden (gn ‘dn), which I identified in terms o f the geography o f Arabia as the oasis ofjunaynah (Arabic for ‘garden’), in Wadi Bishah in inland Asir, downstream from the village o f ‘Adanah (‘dn, identical w ith the Biblical form o f the name for Eden). All four ‘rivers’ o f Eden, and m uch else besides, are found there (see map p. 28). The characters in the Genesis m yth o f the first ‘m an’ and the first ‘w om an’, whose narrative is made to unfold in this setting, are the following, in order o f appearance: 1. Yahweh (yhwh), the God o f the H ebrew Bible 2. The ‘m an’ (h-’dm) 3. The ‘tree o f life’ (h-hyym ) 4. The ‘tree o f know ledge’ (h-d‘h) o f good and evil 5. The ‘w om an’ (h-’sh) 6. The ‘serpent’ (h-nhs) 7. The ‘cherubim ’ (h-krbym) 8. The ‘flaming sw ord’ (Iht h-hrb, literally the ‘flame o f the sw ord’)

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Did Adam Exist?

The sequence o f events in the story deserves careful consideration. Yahweh first creates the man (2:7); next he plants a garden ‘in Eden in the east’ (b-‘dn m-qdm, 2:8, literally ‘in Eden from the east’). In this garden he plants ‘every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food’. W hether or not it was Y ahw eh who planted the ‘tree o f life’ as well as the ‘tree o f know ledge’ is left ambiguous. What is said about these tw o trees is exactly this: ‘And the tree o f life is in the midst o f the garden, and the tree o f the knowledge o f good and evil’ (w-'s h-hyym b-twk h-gn w -‘s h-d‘t twb w-r‘, 2:9). The ambiguity in the story regarding the origin o f these trees may have been deliberate. N ext Yahweh takes the m an and puts him in the garden (2:15). He commands him to eat freely o f every tree there, but forbids him to eat from the tree o f knowledge (2:17a). At this point Yahweh says nothing to the man about the tree o f life, the possible implication being that the man was not yet aware o f its existence. All he does tell him is that if he eats from the tree o f knowledge (with no mention o f the tree o f life) he will im mediately die (2:17b). This, however, proves to be untrue, as when the m an disobeys Yahweh and eats from the fruit o f that tree, he does not die. N o w the w om an enters the scene. Yahweh, having put the man to sleep, takes one o f his ribs, forms the w om an out o f it, and brings her to the man (2:21-22). Next, the serpent appears. ‘M ore subtle than any other wild creature that G od Yahweh had made’, the serpent explains to the woman the real reason w hy God had forbidden her and her husband to eat from the tree o f knowledge: it was not because they w ould die, but because they w ould become like gods (k -’lhym ), know ing good and evil (3:4-5). T he serpent thus prevails on the w om an to defy the command o f Y ahw eh and eat from the forbidden tree. Then the w om an gives some o f its fruit to her husband to eat (3:6). Surmising what had happened, Yahweh summons the man (by implication, alone) and admonishes him for what he has done, and the man lays the blame on the w om an. When Yahweh proceeds to question the woman, she lays the blame on the serpent. Thereupon, Yahweh tells each o f the three what will become o f them (3:9-19). At this point the story is interrupted by the announcement that the man nam ed his wife Eve (hwh ), because she was the m other o f ‘everything living’ (kl hy, 3:20). The woman, it must be noted, had not borne any offspring yet to deserve this name. The w om an called Eve and the serpent now vanish from the scene

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as Yahweh turns to deal w ith the man. Having eaten from the tree o f knowledge, he had become like Yahweh and the other gods — in the words o f Yahweh, ‘like one o f us’ (k - ’hd m-m-nw, 3:22) — know ing good from evil. Yahweh therefore expels him from the garden, lest he should eat from the tree o f life and so live for ever (3:22). As an added precaution, Yahweh places the ‘cherubim ’ and the ‘flame o f the sw ord’ outside the garden to guard the way to the tree o f life (3:24). The initial point w orthy o f note in this story is that Yahweh first created the man; then he planted the garden in Eden in the east-, then he took the man and placed him in the garden — which, as already noted, was the oasis ofjunaynah, a short distance dow nstream from the confluence o f Wadi Bishah in inland Asir; the implication is that Yahweh created the man somewhere west o f Wadi Bishah. Here the name o f Yahweh (yhw h, verbal noun from hwh or hyh) survives to this day as Al Hayah (7 hyh, or ‘the god hyh') — the name o f a village in the Asir highlands, which overlook Wadi Bishah from the west, near the tow n o f Nimas. As the Genesis m yth has it, Yahweh used ‘pr mn h-’dmh (usually taken to mean ‘dust from the ground’) to form the man. Here, however, the H ebrew could mean ‘dust’ (‘pr) from a place called h -’dmh — today a tributary o f Wadi Bishah called Wadi Adamah (exactly ’dmh), whose course starts from the Asir highlands north o f Al Hayah and Nimas. Eden (present ‘Adanah) and its ‘garden’ (Junaynah) are located almost directly east o f this Wadi Adamah, which argues well for the geographical accuracy o f the myth. From the content o f the m yth as already observed, it is clear that Yahweh, w ho created the man in A damah and not in Eden or its garden, is not considered the only god in existence, but one o f a number: a class o f beings w ho enjoyed eternal life, and w ho originally had a m onopoly o f ethical knowledge, until the man created by Yahweh disobeyed him and began to use this know ledge himself. The m yth apparently assumes that the tree o f life and the tree o f knowledge, whose fruits were the preserves o f Yahweh and his fellow gods, were already in the garden o f Eden before Yahweh planted other trees around them. In The Bible Came from Arabia, I pointed out that these tw o sacred trees must have represented a god o f life and a god o f knowledge, whose names survive as those o f the present villages o f Al H ayat (hyt, Arabic form o f hyym, ‘life’)

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D id Adam Exist?

and Al D a‘ya (d‘y \ Aramaic form o f d‘h, ‘know ledge’). The A l in both names is the com m on Semitic ’I, or El, denoting a ‘go d ’. While the village o f Al Hayat is located near the headwaters o f Wadi Bishah, Al D a‘ya is located in the Asir highlands north o f Nimas, close to the headwaters o f Wadi Adamah. In Genesis 6:1-4, it is made quite clear that Yahweh was one god among many. So far, translators o f this passage o f Genesis have been throw n off course by the H ebrew ydwn (6:3a), which is only attested in Biblical H ebrew in this context. The w ord must be translated ‘approach, come near’ (Arabic yadnu, the verbal root being dny, unattested in H ebrew form). Instead, as in the Revised Standard Version translation (RSV), it has been taken to mean ‘abide, dwell’, which in H ebrew w ould be ylwn, not ydwn. Some translators were also confused by the expression b-sgm (6:3b), which simply means ‘in weakness’, in the sense o f ‘w eak’ (said o f mankind; cf. Arabic sqm, vocalized suqm, ‘weakness’). The w ord sgm, instead, was taken to be essentially sg, as the infinitive o f sgg, ‘go astray’, w ith the suffixed m as the third person plural pronoun in the genitive case; hence sgm as a construct, allegedly meaning ‘the going astray o f them ’, i.e. ‘their going astray’. I w ould translate the passage in question as follows, leaving it to the reader to compare it w ith the existing translations: Mankind began to m ultiply on the face o f the earth, and daughters were born to them. T he sons o f the gods (bny h-’lhym) saw that the daughters o f man were fair, and they took wives for themselves from all the ones they chose. Yahweh said: ‘M y spirit shall never approach man (V ydwn rwhy b-’dm l-‘lm)\ he is weak (b-sgm h w ’), flesh (bsr), and his days are a hundred and tw enty years (w-hyw ym yw m ’h w -‘srym snh)’. The N ephilim (h-nplym) were on the earth in those days. Again after that, the sons o f the gods came in to the daughters o f man, and they bore them children; those are the Gebor folk (h-gbrym) w ho have always been the people o f Hashem ('sr m-'wlm ’nsy hsm). Here it m ust be noted that the ‘N ephilim ’ (h-nplym , plural o f npl, cf. Arabic nwpl, vocalized nawfal, ‘handsome young m an’) must have been the ancient inhabitants o f the present twin villages o f Nawafil and Nawafilah (both nwpl in the plural form), near the border o f

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N orth Yemen. The ‘Gebor folk’ (h-gbrym , plural o f gbr, usually translated ‘m ighty m en’) are an ancient tribe o f N o rth Yemen called the Jabr (gbr), still found there to this day. ‘H ashem ’ (hsm , hitherto misread as h-sm, ‘the nam e’, and taken to mean ‘renow n’) is today the oasis o f Al Hashim (hsm) in nearby Wadi Najran. Here again actual geography validates the new translation o f the Biblical Hebrew. Aside from the geography o f this added piece o f Biblical mythology, what it also indicates is a picture o f Yahweh as a god who chose to be different from others — the bny h-’lhym, perhaps meaning the ‘tribe o f the gods’ rather than the ‘sons o f the gods’, as the w ord bny or ‘sons’, in constructs, norm ally denotes a ‘tribe, people’, in ancient H ebrew as well as in m odern Arabic. While the other members o f this ‘tribe o f the gods’ had intimate relations with people, consorted w ith their daughters, and begot progeny from them, Yahweh, eminently conscious that he was essentially ‘spirit’ (rwh), abstained from such behaviour, maintaining his aloofness from mankind. This special character o f Yahweh is brought out in the m yth o f the garden o f Eden. In this m yth the main characters are really Yahweh and the man he had created. The w om an and the serpent in it vanish from the scene after they persuade the man to eat from the tree o f knowledge, and the man alone is subsequently expelled from the garden. It is only at this point in the story that the w om an is identified by name as being Eve. Could it be that the ‘serpent’ (h-trhs, cf. Arabic hns, ‘serpent, snake’) and Eve (hwh) were actually gods? When the w om an in the m yth is first called Eve it is explained that the name was given to her by the man because she was the ‘m other’ not o f all mankind, but o f ‘everything living’ (kl hy, 3:20). It is interesting that the man gives her this name before he actually makes her his wife, and before she has borne him any children; add to this the fact that now here is it said that she was expelled from the garden along w ith the man. She was apparently a m other goddess who belonged there, along w ith the serpent, w ho was perhaps a god o f ‘prudence, subtlety’ (Hebrew ‘rmh). As a goddess o f ‘living’ (hy), in the sense o f fertility or procreation, Eve must have been subordinated to the god o f ‘life’ (hyym), whose sacred tree was in the garden o f Eden. It has already been noted that the village o f Al

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Did Adam Exist?

Hayat, at the headwaters o f Wadi Bishah, still carries the name o f an ancient ‘god o f life’. In Wadi Bishah itself, west o f the village o f 'Adanah (Eden) and the oasis ofjunaynah (the ‘garden’), the name o f Eve (hwh ) also exists as that o f the village o f the ‘living goddess’, Al Hayyah (’I hyh). As a goddess o f procreation, subordinate to the god o f life, Eve is presented in the m yth as a created being. The punishment she receives for her disobedience is the association o f her powers o f procreation, first w ith labour pain, second w ith subordination to man (3:16). The status o f the ‘serpent’ (h-nhs) in the m yth as a deity is equally obvious. He was a god o f ‘prudence, subtlety’, and as such a subordinate o f the god o f knowledge — Al D a‘ya, as his name still survives as a place name in the Wadi Bishah vicinity. It is not surprising that the ‘serpent’ should have introduced the ‘living goddess’ Eve, and ultimately the man, to the forbidden fruit o f the tree o f knowledge — the tree sacred to its master, Al D a‘ya, the god o f knowledge. Again, the name o f the ‘serpent’ stands immortalized as that o f the village o f Al Hanlshah (7 hns), the ‘serpent god’, located in the immediate vicinity o f its master, Al D a‘ya, the ‘god o f knowledge’, in the Asir highlands overlooking the Wadi Bishah confluence. The correct story must probably be retold as follows: Yahweh created a man out o f the soil o f Wadi Adamah. He then trespassed on the territory o f Al Hayat, the god o f life, and Al D a‘ya, the god o f knowledge, in the oasis o fju n a y n a h at the confluence o f Wadi Bishah, where each o f these tw o gods had a sacred tree in his name. Yahweh, apparently, had earlier sought to encroach on the prerogatives o f Al D a‘ya by creating his ow n subordinate god o f prudence and subtlety, Al Hanlshah. According to the standing text o f Genesis the ‘serpent’ was am ong the creatures which Yahweh him self had made (3:1). N o w Yahweh planted his ow n garden in Junaynah, placed his ow n man there, took one o f his ribs (singular sl‘h), and fashioned it into a w om an w ho was actually Al Hayyah (alias Eve), Yahweh’s ow n goddess o f procreation. Having already encroached on the prerogatives o f the god o f knowledge, Yahweh was apparently no less determined to encroach also on those o f the god o f life. The ‘rib’ which he took from the man to fashion into Eve or Al Hayyah, seems also to have been revered at one time as a divine being: a secondary deity called Sal‘ah [sl'h), whose name

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Secrets o f the Bible People

survives in the Asir highlands as that o f the village o f Al Sal‘I (’I sl‘y), in Jabal Faifa not far from Al Hayat.

Things, however, did not end w ith the results Yahweh had planned. Though originally created by Yahweh, Al Hanlshah betrayed him and made com m on cause w ith Al D a ‘ya, persuading Al Hayyah to do the same. This occurred w hen the ‘serpent’ met the ‘w om an’ alone (the story, as told in 3:1-6, does not m ention the presence o f the ‘m an ’ at the meeting), and persuaded her to eat from the tree o f knowledge. Then Al Hayyah prevailed on the man to eat from the tree against Y ahw eh’s bidding. Yahweh, w ho was determined to keep the ‘garden’ ofjunaynah for himself, was furious; more than that, he was afraid that the ‘m an’ he had created would become a god in his ow n right. The measures he proceeded to take were radical: he dem oted Al Hanlshah from the status o f a secondary god to a creature that crawled on its belly and ate dust (3:14) — an ordinary snake. Al Hayyah was also depotentized to become an ordinary woman, subordinate to man, w hose destiny was to bear children in pain (3:16). The tw o form er associates in divine conspiracy were also turned into mortal, mutual enemies (3:15). As for the man who was the dupe o f their conspiracy, he was expelled from the garden, as Yahweh feared that should he stay he m ight eat o f the tree o f life and become a complete god. He had already gained one o f the fundamental attributes o f divinity by eating from the tree o f knowledge. To keep his ‘garden’ at Junaynah under proper control and to prevent his ‘m an’ from ever entering it again, Yahweh entrusted its guardianship to the cherubim (h-krbym ) — literally, the ‘priests’ (cf. krb, also mkrb, in ancient South Arabian, meaning ‘priest, high priest’). Here the m yth attempts to explain the origin o f the priesthood, apparently as a class o f people entrusted w ith preventing ordinary human creatures from trespassing on the prerogatives o f the gods; in this case, on the prerogatives o f Yahweh, w ho was resolved to turn the other gods — mainly the god o f life and the god o f ethical knowledge — into his subordinates. Moreover, Yahweh saw to it that the ‘flame’ (Iht) o f a ‘sw ord ’ (hrb) guarded the access to the tree o f life. Here again w hat we have in question is a secondary divinity: the ‘one o f the flame’, whose name survives as that o f tw o villages at the headwaters o f Wadi Bishah called today Al Bu-Hatalah (7 b-htl , cf. Iht), the ‘god w ith the flame’. Yahweh

D id Adam Exist?

was determined that the man he had created, and w ho had acquired ethical knowledge by daring to consort w ith other gods, should at least remain mortal. The m y th o f Cain and A bel The m yth concerning Y ahw eh’s creation o f man and his condemnation o f him to m ortality is im mediately followed in Genesis (4:1-16) by another m yth concerning the origin o f hum an conflict. In this story also, a fundamental reality is explained in terms o f a story whose geographical setting, at least, is real. Here the characters in order o f appearance are the following: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

The ‘m an’ (h-’dm) Eve (hwh) Cain (qyn), their first son Abel (hbl), their second son Yahweh

The story begins w ith the ‘m an’, w ho is still nameless, making Eve his wife. Considering w hat we have already surmised from the first myth, this marriage appears to have been consummated between an ordinary man w ho has ethical know ledge but is mortal, and Al Hayyah, the goddess o f procreation. Al Hayyah, having previously been reduced by Yahweh to the status o f an ordinary woman, is subordinate to his ‘m an ’, w ho no w actualizes his sexual dominance over her. She was also condemned by Yahweh to painful child­ bearing, so she conceives by the ‘m an’ and bears two sons in succession: Cain, then Abel. The ‘m an’ and the depotentized goddess who has become his wife now vanish from the scene, leaving their two sons to deal w ith Yahweh on their own. Cain is a cultivator and he makes an offering to Yahweh o f his agricultural produce. His brother Abel is a pastoralist and he makes an offering to Yahweh o f his choice flocks. Yahweh accepts the offering o f Abel, showing no regard to the offering o f Cain. When Cain is angered by this arbitrary discrimination, Yahweh explains to him that his choice is between accepting what has happened in good grace, or resorting to sinful action. In his anger, Cain follows the second course and kills his brother Abel. Yahweh questions Cain about Abel, eliciting an evasive 37

Secrets o f the Bible People

answer: ‘Am I m y brother’s keeper?’ B ut the voice o f Abel’s blood calls to Yahweh from the ground, and Cain, as his murderer, is condemned to become a permanent fugitive and wanderer on the earth. Cain protests against the severity o f the sentence; he is particularly afraid that the exposure could lead him to be slain by whoever finds him. Yahweh, therefore, alleviates the sentence by placing a m ark on him for his protection, declaring that vengeance will be taken sevenfold on anyone w ho kills him. Cain then goes to live ‘east o f Eden’, in the ‘land o f N o d ’ (Vs nwd) — literally the ‘land o f wandering’. Actually w hat lies east o f ‘Adanah and Junaynah in Wadi Bishah is open desert. Here again the Genesis m yth is obviously set in Wadi Bishah, where the name o f the murdered Abel (hbl ) still survives, carried by the oasis o f Hubal (exactly hbl). In apotheosis this son o f a demoted goddess and an ordinary man could well have come to be worshipped as the well-attested Arabian god Hubal (also hbl), w hose cult survived in the peninsula until the coming o f Islam. Actually a num ber o f places carrying variant forms o f the same name are to be found in different parts o f Arabia, which attests to the popularity o f the Hubal cult in its time. As for Cain (qyn), his name survived into early Islamic times as that o f the Arabian tribe o f the Q ayn (exactly qyn), who were regarded by their contemporaries as the hum ble remnants o f a vanished Arabian people. In Arabian tradition it is not only a grave offence, but also a disgrace, for a m em ber o f a respectable tribe to attack or kill a m em ber o f the hum bler desert folk, w ho are considered protected. Such, today, are the gypsy-like Sulubah — the defenceless tinkers and entertainers o f the Syro-Arabian desert. In Hebrew the name Cain (qyn, vocalized qayin) means ‘sm ith’. In Arabic the same w ord means ‘sm ith’ and is also used to denote a ‘tinker’ in a m ore general sense, a jack o f all trades w ho does menial w ork o f all kinds. Yahweh, it seems, condemned Cain to become the prototype o f the m odern Arabian Sulubah. The ‘m ark’ o f Cain must have been the sort o f tattoo by which the Sulubah are still distinguished today from other desert people. In the m yth o f Cain and Abel, we may have m ore than meets the eye. O n one level, the story deals w ith the theme o f hum an conflict. It says, effectively, that there is an intrinsic unfairness in the world, which pits the unfavoured against the favoured and leads to violence. Yet in the story there is a reason w hy Yahweh showed favour to Abel,

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Did Adam Exist?

but paid no regard to Cain, and thus turned brother against brother. Abel had offered Yahweh an animal sacrifice, which he accepted; Cain had offered him a vegetable sacrifice, w hich he refused. Is it possible that the myth, rather than dealing w ith the question o f human conflict, or in addition to that, preserves the m em ory o f an ancient Arabian vegetarian cult, possibly associated w ith the Cain or Qayn people, which was strongly disapproved o f by the followers o f the original and definitely non-vegetarian Yahweh cult? For the m om ent we shall simply pose the question and return to it in later chapters as more evidence becomes available. T he Cain legen d U ntil the point in the story where Cain kills Abel, w hat is involved is definitely myth. Beyond this point, however, legend begins, where the Cain are actually a people, personified by their eponymous ancestor. The people in question, in fact, are none other than the Kenites (h-qyny ), as they are called elsewhere in the Bible (Genesis 15:19; N um bers 24:21; Judges 1:16; 4:11, 17; 5:24; 1 Samuel 15:6; 27:10; 30:29; as h-qynym, 1 Chronicles 2:55). The historical Q ayn tribe o f Arabia, as already noted, bore the same name and could have been the remnants o f the same Biblical people. As the m yth o f Cain and Abel begins to turn into the legend concerning the origin o f the Cain folk, a geographical switch occurs. In the m yth Yahweh condemns Cain, after he had murdered his brother, to become a ‘w anderer’ (Hebrew nd, 4:12, 14) in the land o f N od (nwd ), meaning the land o f ‘w andering’ — the open desert east o f Wadi Bishah beyond ‘Adanah (Eden) and Junaynah (the ‘garden’). The Genesis text actually specifies that this land o f ‘w andering’ lay east o f Eden (4:16). In the same sentence, however, we are told that Cain w ent to ‘dw ell’ or ‘settle’ (y'b), not ‘wander’, in the land o f N od; and precisely at this point the m yth in the story ends and the legend commences. T he juncture between the two tales involves a play on the w ord nwd, w hich can mean ‘w andering’ and which is also a place name, today N aw dah (exactly nwd) — either o f tw o villages having the same nam e in the highlands o f northern Yemen. While the Cain o f the m y th was condemned to become an eternal ‘w anderer’ (nd) in the land o f ‘w andering’ east o f Wadi Bishah, the Cain o f the legend, as the personification o f a people by that name, w ent to ‘settle’ (ysb) in the territory o f N aw dah in northern

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Secrets o f the Bible People

Yemen. Considering that tribes and peoples norm ally take their names from their lands o f origin, I w ould guess that the Cain folk, or Kenites (Arabic Qayn, and in all cases qyn) were originally established in the valley o f Wadi Q ayinah (exactly qyn), in the southern part o f the Yemen, before they migrated to the highlands further north to settle in the ‘land o f N o d ’, which was in the vicinity o f one o f the tw o N o rth Yemen villages called N aw dah to this day. After noting the settlement o f Cain in the land o f N aw dah, the legend turns to concentrate on the proliferation o f the Cain people and their geographical whereabouts (4:17-24). Cain, we are told, marries and begets a ‘son’ called Enoch (hnwk)\ then he builds a city and calls it after his son’s name. Enoch then begets a ‘son’ called Irad (‘yrd). W hat is indicated here, beyond doubt, is a northw ard migration o f the Cain folk from the territory o f N aw dah in the Yemen, into the highlands o f Asir: first to an Enoch which is the present village o f Hanakah (hnk), near the tow n o f D hahran al-Janub; then further north to an Irad which is today Al ‘Irad (' rd), near Abha. Irad’s ‘son’ is Mehujael (m hw y’l), today Muhayil (mhyl), a tow n on the maritime side o f Asir north-w est o f Abha. This Mehujael, in turn, has a ‘son’, Methushael (mtws’l , to be parsed mtws 7) — today probably H awd al-Mushayt (the ‘well’ o f 7 msyt, metathesis o f mtws), near Muhayil, rather than Al M ushayt (7 msyt), near the tow n o f Khamis Mushait (which is again msyt), east o f Abha. M ethushael’s son, whose name is Lamech (Imk ), takes tw o ‘wives’, Adah (“dh) and Zillah (slh). The nearest ‘Lamech’ to Muhayil and H awd al-Mushayt is Al Kamil (femZ, metathesis o f Imk), in the Ballahmar region not far to the north. Here the ‘Lamech’ or Al Kamil folk m ust have form ed tribal coalitions w ith tw o neighbours: those o f ‘Idwah (‘dwh), in the adjacent Bani Shahr hill country to the north (Lamech’s ‘wife’ Adah); and those o f Silah {slh), in the Rijal Alma‘ hill country to the south (Lamech’s ‘w ife’ Zillah). O f the tw o ‘wives’ o f Lamech, Adah becomes the m other ofjabal (ybl) and Jubal (ywbl ). Zillah, on the other hand, becomes the m other o f Tubal (twbl) and his ‘sister’ Naamah (n'mh ). In terms o f Arabian geography, the places indicated appear to be the following: 1. Buwalah (bwl, cf. ybl, for ‘Jabal’), near Muhayil. 2. Buwaylah (bwyl, cf. ybwl, for ‘Jubal’) in the T aif region o f the southern Hijaz.

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D id Adam Exist?

3. The valley o f Wadi Tulab (twlb, cf. twbl, for ‘Tubal’), in central Najd, west o f the present city o f Riyadh. 4. N a‘im ah i (exactly n ‘mh, for ‘N aam ah’, the ‘sister’ o f Tubal), also in central Najd. More evidence emerges regarding the proliferations o f the Cain people as the legend continues. T he original H ebrew proceeds to say that ‘J abal’ (that is to say, present Buwalah, near Muhayil) was ‘the father o f the inhabitants o f O hel and M iqneh’ ( ’by ysb ’hi w-mqnh, 4:20, traditionally taken to mean ‘the father o f those w ho dwell in tents and have cattle’). Ohel (’hi) is today Al Yahil (yhl), in the northern Asir highlands; M iqneh (mqnh) is the valley o f Wadi Maqniyah (mqnyh), north o f Muhayil, and downhill from Al Yahil. As for ‘Jubal’ (that is to say, present Buwaylah, in the T aif region), he is described as ‘the father o f all Topesh, Kinor and ‘O gab’ (’by kl tps knwr w -‘wgb, 4:21, hitherto translated as ‘the father o f all those who play the lyre and pipe’ (RSV)). Actually Shatfah (stp, cf. tps), Qurayn (qryn, cf. knwr) and ‘U q ub (‘qb, cf. ‘wgb) still exist as three villages of the T aif region w here Buwaylah (Biblical ‘Jubal’) is also located. There remains ‘Tubal’ (Wadi Tulab), Lamech’s ‘son’ by his wife Zillah, and the brother o f Naamah. In the Hebrew o f Genesis he is described as follows: ‘Tubal, a smith (twbl qyn), the forger o f all tools o f copper and iron’ (Its kl hrs nhst w-brzl, 4:22). So far, the Hebrew twbl qyn, rather than being taken to mean ‘Tubal, a sm ith’ or ‘Tubal, the sm ith’, which is its obvious meaning, has been rendered in translation as the double-barrelled name Tubal-cain. It seems to me certain that the Tubal folk — the ancient inhabitants o f Wadi Tulab in central N ajd — were in their time the prototypes o f the modern Sulubah, the tinkers (singular qyn) o f the Arabian desert, as Genesis actually indicates. From this geographical analysis o f the Genesis story o f the Cain folk, one can learn exactly w hy this legend was made to dovetail so closely with the m yth o f Cain and Abel, which must originally have been an entirely different story. According to the legend, descendants o f Cain (i.e. a branch o f the Cain people) inhabited Ohel, today Al Yahil, in the northern Asir highlands, as already noted. This Al Yahil is located at the headwaters o f a valley called today Wadi Kanahbalah (knhbl). The nam e makes no sense at all unless it is

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Secrets o f the Bible People

understood as a construct o f some kind. In ancient times some Arabian story-teller m ust have taken it to be kn hbl, recognizing in it a combination o f the names o f Cain (qyn) and Abel (hbl). Cain was know n to be the name o f a people, and Abel (as Hubal, see above) the name o f a god; so the legend o f Cain and the m yth o f the god Abel were combined in one story which began as m yth and ended as legend. It is o f such stuff that popular lore is often made. T he legend o f Seth After the legend o f Cain comes the legend o f Adam, Seth and Enosh (4:25-26). W hen the Genesis stories were put together, some redactor, using a simple device, identified the A dam (’dm) o f this legend, w ho was the ‘father’ o f Seth by an unnam ed wife, w ith ‘the m an’ (h-’dm) o f the Eden myths, w ho was the husband o f Eve and the father o f the mythological Cain and Abel. Where the original opening sentence o f the Seth legend probably said, ‘Adam knew (i.e. had intercourse with) his wife, and she bore a son’, the redactor, interpolating only one w ord into the text, wrote: ‘Adam knew his wife again (Hebrew {u’d), and she bore a son.’ At the same stage o f redaction or at some later stage, the confusion between the legendary Adam and the mythological ‘m an’ o f Eden was com pounded by making A dam ’s unnamed wife say after the birth o f their son Seth: ‘God has appointed for me another child instead o f Abel, for Cain slew him ’ (4:25b). This second and m ore tendentious interpolation not only identifies A dam ’s wife as being the ‘Eve’ o f the Eden myths, but also ties the legend o f Adam and his descendants w ith the m yth o f Cain and Abel, as well as w ith the legend o f Cain. The wife o f the Adam o f the Seth legend is not actually called Eve in the text o f Genesis because she was not Eve at all. She was simply the unnam ed ‘w om an’ (’sh) who was the m other o f Seth. W hat the Adam legend seeks to explain is the relationship between two tribes or communities o f the southern highlands o f the Yemen, whose names both survived into Islamic times: the That (tt, cf. st, or ‘Seth’) and the Anas Allah (the ’ns o f ‘G od’, cf. ’nws, for ‘Enosh’). The legend also explains w hy the Anas folk were called Anas Allah: ‘In the days o f Enosh, ’ it says, ‘the name o f Y ahweh was first invoked’ (4:26b); therefore, by implication, the Anas or Enosh were, in their time, G od’s special people. Indeed the H ebrew ’nws, as the Arabic ’ns, actually means ‘people’. These tw o tribes or communities, it

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Did Adam Exist?

seems, came originally from the m ountain region o f Jabal Adim (’dm, also the Biblical name for Adam), the Anas Allah being a branch o f the That. Thus ‘Seth’ (i.e. the That) is depicted in the Genesis legend as the ‘son’ o f ‘A d am ’ (i.e. Jabal Adim), while ‘Enosh’ (i.e. the Anas Allah) is depicted as the ‘son’ o f ‘Seth’. H ow was it that the legend o f the ‘sons’ ofjabal Adim (or M ount Adam, if we may so call it) became confused with the m yth o f Yahweh’s creation o f ‘m an’? First, the name ofjabal Adim happens to be the same in its consonantal spelling as the Hebrew w ord for man (’dm). Furtherm ore, the m yth o f the creation o f ‘m an’ is set in the vicinity o f an Eden which is today ‘Adanah (‘dn), in Wadi Bishah in inland Asir. The legend o f ‘A dam ’ and his progeny also belongs to a land o f ‘E den’ — the southern highlands o f the Yemen which form the hinterland o f the present city o f Aden — in Arabic, ‘Adan (also ‘dn). Apart from this, there is no relationship between the m yth regarding the ‘m an’ o f Eden and the legend o f Adam, his ‘son’ Seth, and his ‘grandson’ Enosh. T he first is a beautiful and highly thoughtful story which elaborates on the fundamental human predicament: how man gained the ethical knowledge which was originally the preserve o f the gods, bu t failed to become a god by being denied immortality. The second is no more than a piece o f ancient South Arabian lore concerned w ith the origins o f two local folk whose historicity is beyond question. In the m yth o f Eden, as in the m yth o f Cain and Abel, there are elements for endless reflection on themes o f universal im port. This much has long been realized. W hat has not so far been adequately appreciated is the extent to which the hum drum legends about the progeny o f Cain, o f the Adam w ho was not his father, and o f the Seth w ho was not his brother, provide precious insights into the ancient history o f Arabia — a history o f which so little is known.

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2 The M ystery o f Noah

In the book o f Genesis, N oah features m ost prominently as the hero o f the flood saga (6:11-8:22) — a m yth found in many cultures, concerning a great deluge which destroys the world because o f its ram pant wickedness, leaving only a chosen group o f the good and the faithful to survive. In some o f the Polynesian flood myths, the flood is caused by a catastrophic rising o f the ocean waters, which indicates a tidal wave — the type o f catastrophic inundation with which the Polynesian w orld o f the Pacific Ocean is familiar. In the Chinese m yth the flood is a prim ordial condition which is finally brought under control by dam ming the waters and arranging outlets to the sea for them. Here the theme clearly relates to the taming o f great rivers, like those found in China, where the inundations are caused not by heavy rainfall, but by the seasonal melting o f snows at the source. In the Genesis story o f the flood, the deluge is caused by torrential rains which continue for forty days. The same is true o f the M esopotam ian flood story told in the Epic o f Gilgamesh, and it is generally believed that the Genesis story is a borrow ing from a M esopotamian original. I believe it must have been the other way round, as floods in Mesopotamia are river inundations mainly caused by the melting o f m ountain snows. H ad the M esopotamian flood story been indigenous, it w ould have proved closer to the Chinese saga than to the Biblical one, which m ore eminently fits the Arabian setting. O ne w ould have expected at least to find a mention o f rivers in an indigenously M esopotamian flood myth. In Arabia, on the other hand, floods can only be caused by rains, there being no major

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The Mystery o f Noah

rivers to inundate, and no snow-capped mountains to cause such inundation. M ost likely the Genesis story o f the flood has its origins in an indigenous Arabian m ythology, and the ancient Mesopotamians borrow ed the theme from that same mythological source. In Genesis, however, N oah is not only the hero o f the flood story; he is other things as well: 1. He is a descendant o f the tenth generation o f Adam, born 1056 years after the birth o f Adam (5:3-19); and the span o f his ow n life is 950 years (9:29). 2. He sires three sons, Shem, H am and Japheth, after he is 500 years old (5:32); and his three sons become the ancestors o f related groups o f peoples (10:2-30). 3. The flood occurs when he is 600 years old (7:6), when his sons are already there, and also married (7:7). 4. He is a saintly figure: ‘a righteous man, blameless in his generation’, and ‘he walked w ith G od’ (6:9). 5. After the flood subsides, God makes a covenant w ith N oah and his descendants after him (9:8), whose ‘sign’ is the rainbow (9:12-17); he also provides them w ith a summary code which establishes the principle o f lex talionis, specifies that food m ust consist o f animal flesh as well as vegetables, but forbids the eating o f the flesh o f an animal w ith its blood (9:3-6). 6. N oah is the ‘man o f ha-adamah (h-’dmh )’ (usually taken to mean ‘man o f the soil’, in the sense o f ‘farm er’) who plants a vineyard and makes wine o f its produce (9:20-21). This story tells how he became drunk w ith the wine he made; h o w his son H am saw him lying naked in his drunkenness and did nothing about it; and how the misbehaviour o f H am on this occasion had negative consequences on the social status o f some o f his progeny (9:22-27). As already noted in the previous chapter, the book o f Genesis is an anthology o f ancient lore compiled and redacted from different stories. The N oah story, like the other Genesis stories, is in itself a composite piece o f lore. In view o f the range o f information it provides, one would be justified in thinking that its hero, Noah, actually personifies four different things: first, an ancient society, people or tribe from which other social communities proliferated; second, the hero o f an indigenous Arabian story about a great flood;

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Secrets o f the Bible People

third, an ancient mystery religion whose ‘sign’ was the rainbow; fourth, a legendary maker o f wine w ho is also a wine-bibber. For a better understanding o f what N oah actually was, it would be helpful to treat these four different aspects o f him separately. T he N oah p eop le A tribe is a social com m unity w ith a sense o f com m on identity, bound together by com m on loyalties and traditions, normally claiming a com m on ancestor and inhabiting a contiguous territory. In tribal societies tribal loyalties shift w ith tim e as old tribes break up and new ones are formed from the fragments. Tribes, however, are called after their territories, or give their names to their lands, and such appellations usually survive and endure as local place names. These same names are often adopted by new tribes which have no historical connection w ith their older namesakes, except for the geographical location. Hence, m any tribal names found in the Hebrew Bible came to survive in Arabia, not only as place names but also often as the names o f historical or existing tribes. Whatever the actual origins o f its name, a tribe normally maintains that its appellation is derived from that o f a legendary ancestor. Moreover, tribal lore frequently telescopes the history o f a vanished tribe — or that o f a tribal kingdom or principality — into a legend recounting the deeds o f the eponym ous ancestor. In the tribal societies in which such legends circulate, metaphorical language is readily understood. Should the legend say, for example, that its hero’s life spanned the better part o f a thousand years, the implication is clear: this was the estimated life span o f the tribe, or o f the kingdom or principality founded by this tribe, not o f the eponym ous hero who is made to personify its history. The N oah (nh) w ho reportedly lived 950 years, w ho sired Shem, H am and Japheth w hen he was over 500, and w ho also witnessed the flood at the age o f 600, was beyond doubt a tribe. So were his alleged ancestors, nine in all, the first three o f them being Adam, Seth and Enosh (chapter 1). The six remaining alleged ancestors in order o f descent from Enosh (historically the Anas Allah tribe o f southern Yemen) are the following: Kenan (qynn ), Mahalalel (mhll’l), Jared (yrd ), Enoch (htiwk ), Methuselah (mtwslh) and Lamech (Imk). O f these six names, those ofjared, Enoch and Lamech are historically attested as those o f three tribes o f the same region o f the Yemen:

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The Mystery o f Noah

the W ard (wrd) tribe and two o f its branches, the Hinak (hnk ) and the M alik (mlk ). The name o f Kenan is practically identical w ith that o f the great historical tribal confederation of the Kinanah (knn), also o f the Yemen. Methuselah (mtw slh, the ‘m an’ o f slh), as a name, seems to be that o f the historical Salih (slh): a tribe o f the Yemen who migrated to Syria in the early centuries o f the Christian era. Mahalalel (mhll 7, the ‘praise o f G od’, the root o f mhll being hll , ‘praise’) is possibly an older form o f the nam e o f the South Arabian Hilal (hll) tribe o f the coastlands o f the Red Sea, who crossed over to E gypt in Islamic times and overran N orth Africa in the tenth century AD. T he N oah people, it seems, were originally a tribe from the Yemen, w here they were apparently organized for a time as a kingdom or principality, as will be seen. When the central authority in the N oah state began to weaken w ith time, different branches o f the N o ah folk — the Shem, the H am and the Japheth — broke away from the main body o f the N oah and asserted their separate tribal independence in their respective localities. In the N oah legend, as reported by Genesis, Shem, H am and Japheth were born to him after he was 500 years old, and they were already married with households o f their own before he was 600. As the N oah society in the Y emen began to disintegrate, possibly to the accompaniment o f tribal wars, it was only natural for some o f the N oah people to m igrate and settle elsewhere. It could well have been a natural catastrophe, such as a flood, which triggered off one o f these migrations, which resulted in the establishment o f a N oah (nh) com m unity in the Medina region o f the central Hijaz, near the oasis o f Khaibar. There one finds to this day a tribe called the Nahayln (Arabic for the rth folk), in the vicinity o f a village called Naha (exactly nh). Historically, tribal migrations from the Yemen to the Hijaz, and further north into Syria, are well attested. According to an Arabian legend, .as recorded by Arab historians o f early Islamic times, one such migration in late pre-Islamic times followed the breaking o f the great dam at Maarib and the resulting flood, which caused large areas in the inland parts o f the Y emen to be devastated. While the name o f the Noah, as I have shown, survives to this day in the Hijaz, the names o f the Shem (sm), the H am (hm) and the Japheth (ypt) survive in different parts o f the Yemen. The village o f Shum m (sm), in one part, still carries the name o f Shem, as did

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Secrets o f the Bible People

also at one time the historically attested tribe o f the Sumayy (smy). The name o f Ham, in another part, is that'T©flbe^valley o f the Wadi Ham (exactly hm); and the nam e o f Japheth is that o f the mountain called Jabal Wafit (tvpt). The Shem, the H am and the Japheth were apparently branches o f the N oah people w ho belonged to these different localities. Considering that their names are not found in the Hijaz, one m ight assume that they did not join the migration of their fellow N oah folk in that direction. Unlike the N oah w ith w hom they had originally been associated, their hom e territories may not have been devastated by the great flood which could have caused the N oah to migrate. T he flo o d In the inland-draining valleys o f South-West Arabia, floods can be terrifying, taking little m ore than a few hours ofheavy rain to produce a substantial torrent. Should the rain last for days, these floods are bound to cause massive devastation. The flood, which reportedly occurred when the N oah tribe or tribal state was in its six hundredth year, was caused by rains which continued for ‘forty days and forty nights’ (7:12). A fraction o f the time w ould have sufficed to produce a memorable inundation. Considering the frequency o f floods in those parts, it is possible that the local people had learned to prepare wooden floaters covered w ith pitch (6:14) for the emergency — hence the legend o f N o ah ’s ‘ark’. Putting together evidence from the book o f Genesis and the Koran, one can determine the exact place where the flood o f N oah occurred. According to the Genesis story (6:14), N o ah ’s ‘ark’ was made of ‘gopher w ood’ (Vy gpr, literally the ‘w o o d ’ or ‘trees’ o f gpr). This gpr is not mentioned as a particular kind o f w ood anywhere else in the Bible. The indicated w ood is most probably from the forests o f Jafar (exactly gpr), in north-east Yemen, at the headwaters o f the flood-prone valley o f Wadi Najran. In the Koran (11:40; 23:27), the flood o f N o ah ’s time is attributed to the inundation o f al-Tannur — no doubt the sandstone hillocks o f Jabal al-Tannur, flanking Wadi Najran from the south. Incidentally, many rocks o f these hillocks are engraved w ith ancient sketches. O ne may safely conclude, therefore, that the N oah folk w ho were hit by the Biblical flood were the inhabitants o f Wadi Najran before the flood forced them to move elsewhere.

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The Mystery o f Noah

In the Genesis account (8:3-4), it is said that the waters o f the flood took 150 days to abate, w hereupon N oah’s ‘ark’ came to rest upon the ‘m ountains’ — not the ‘m ountain’ — o f Ararat (hry ’rrt), so far taken to refer to M ount Ararat in Armenia, in Asia M inor. Apart from the actual location o f the Biblical ‘mountains o f A rarat’, the following m ust be observed here: 1. Genesis notes the exact date w hen the flood began: ‘In the six hundredth year o f N o ah ’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day o f the m onth’ (7:11). 2. Genesis also notes the exact day w hen the ark came to rest on the ‘mountains o f Ararat’: ‘in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day o f the m o n th ’ (8:4), the intervening period being ‘a hundred and fifty days’ (8:3). 3. Genesis further notes that the waters of the flood were finally dry ‘in the six hundred and first year, in the first month, on the first day o f the m o n th ’ (8:13); moreover, that Noah and his family left the ark ‘in the second month, on the twenty-seventh day o f the m o n th ’ o f that same year (8:14). The calendar involved here m ust have been an ancient one marking a particular era in the history o f South-W est Arabia — what we m ight call the N oah era. Considering that the period o f the inundation lasted exactly five months, am ounting to 150 days, the m onth in this calendar m ust have been 30 days, which indicates a solar calendar of 360 days to the year, periodically adjusted somehow to fit the real solar year. Unless such an adjustment was due in the year o f the flood, the total num ber o f days which N oah and his family spent in the ark w ould have been 370. Had the calendar been adjusted annually to 365 days by the addition o f five feast days to the twelve­ m onth year, their stay in the ark w ould have been 375 days. Had the calendar been adjusted every six years, from the very beginning o f the N oah era, by the addition o f a thirteenth month, the year 600 would have been one in which such an adjustment was due, in which case the stay in the ark would have am ounted to 400 days. For a society to follow a regular solar calendar requiring periodical adjustments, it must have an organization that transcends the tribal level, indicating that it must be organized as a state o f some type. M oreover, it is difficult to maintain a calendar w ithout some form

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o f writing, in order to keep a fixed record. This should lead us to suspect that the N oah people, at the time w hen they were established in the Yemen, were a literate society organized as a state, with its centre perhaps (but not necessarily) in Wadi Najran. In the lore o f the Yemen to this day, N oah is one o f the m ore dom inant figures, and his son Shem is credited as the founder o f the city o f Sanaa, which was the capital o f the Yemen at different periods, and remains the present capital o f N o rth Yemen. According to recorded Arab tradition, the later kings o f the H im yar dynasty w ho ruled the country in the sixth century AD, and w ho were Jews, regarded themselves as the successors o f N oah and the followers o f a monotheism o f which he was the original founder. O ne is left wondering here w hether the Biblical N oah could have been the N oah dynasty rather than the N oah people. And is it possible that all his Biblical predecessors, to w hom Genesis assigns life spans covering hundreds o f years (5:3-31), were also ruling dynasties rather than tribes or peoples? Turning from the question o f the N oah calendar, there are other points to consider in the Genesis account o f the flood. In Arabia floods can be highly destructive, but their waters do not last; they rapidly find their natural outlets to the desert, where they vanish into the sands. The pools and m ud they leave behind do not take long to dry. Certainly, no flood waters in Arabia can last for five months, leaving the land w et and m uddy for the better part o f a year. The 150 days it took N o ah ’s ark to settle on the ‘mountains o f Ararat’, and the additional m inim um o f 220 days it took for N oah and his family to leave the ark, must be interpreted in terms other than the inundation and the sodden earth it left behind. To m y mind it must denote the time the N oah folk took, after abandoning their devastated territory in Wadi Najran, to complete the first tw o stages o f their northw ard migration. Following the course o f the Yamamah valley towards Central Arabia (see map p. 46), tribesmen w ith their families, travelling at the slow average pace o f five kilometres a day, w ould have taken 150 days to cross the 750 kilometres from Wadi Najran to ‘Ararat’ {’rrt), today’s U rat (’rt) — an oasis nestling in the T uw ayq hills which form the dorsal spine o f the Najd plateau — the Biblical ‘mountains o f Ararat’. An additional 220 days at the m inim um w ould have provided them w ith enough time to rest at this oasis, then proceed

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The Mystery o f Noah

further north to reach the village o f Tabah (tbh) — one o f the landmarks o f the Hail region, in the northern part o f Najd, at the foot o f the ridge o f Jabal Salma. As it happens, the w ord for an ‘ark’ in Biblical H ebrew is tebah (tbh, in constructs tbt). In Biblical m yth and legend, as in Near East lore in general, there is much play on words; the simple are left to take w hat is said literally, but the m ore percipient are expected to derive more. According to the Genesis story (8:19), N oah, his family and all the living creatures that were w ith them finally ‘went out o f the ark’ (ys’w mn h-tbh) when it became possible for them to do so. The same H ebrew sentence would also mean that they ‘went out o f Tabah’. From there they w ould have had to cross another 500 kilometres to reach the Medina region in the central Hijaz, where they appear to have finally settled, and w here their name still survives as that o f the village o f Naha, and the local tribe o f the Nahayln. The N o a h cu lt and the m ystery o f the rainbow As I see it, the story o f Noah, as told in Genesis, is not only an account o f a tribal migration in prehistoric Arabia; it is also a cultic allegory w ith inner meanings to be resolved. In this allegory the principal figures appear on the surface to be two: Yahweh, sometimes simply referred to as God, and N oah. U pon closer examination other figures appear. Here, to begin with, is the sequence o f the action: 1. Yahweh is deeply grieved by the wickedness o f man and the corrupt ways o f all ‘flesh’ (bsr) on the earth, so he decides to ‘make an end o f all flesh’ (6:11-13). 2. Y ahw eh secretly divulges his intentions to N oah (nh); he instructs him to build an ark (tbh, in constructs tbt, cf. Arabic tabut, or tbt, ‘ark, coffin’) large enough for him, his family and male and temale samples o f all living ‘flesh’. H e is ordered to stock this ark with adequate provisions, as the devastation o f the earth shall be by flood. N oah does as he is com m anded (6:13-22). 3. Yahweh, convinced o f N o a h ’s righteousness before him, instructs him to enter the ark w ith his household and all the living creatures in their company and tells him that the flood will begin after seven days, and will last forty days and nights. Again N oah obeys (7:1-5).

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4. When the flood comes exactly as predicted, producing an inundation which covers the highest mountains, the ark floats on the surface o f the waters. W hen the waters begin to abate, the ark finally comes to ‘settle’ on dry land (7:12 - 8:4). The w ord used for ‘settle’ here is tnh, from nwh, the root from which the name Noah, or nh, is derived. Noah, as a name o f this derivation, means ‘settlement’. 5. N oah stays in the ark until Yahweh instructs him to leave with his family and all the living ‘flesh’ that was w ith him, whose species are now enjoined to breed abundantly and multiply on the earth (8:15-19). 6. Having left the ark, N oah builds an altar and makes sacrifices to Yahweh o f every animal and bird that is considered ritually clean (8 :20 ). 7. Yahweh is greatly pleased by the odour o f N o ah ’s sacrifices, and decides in his heart never ‘to curse the groun d’ again because o f the wickedness o f man, which he admits to be part o f hum an nature, being innate rather than volitional. Therefore, he announces: ‘While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, sum m er and winter, day and night, shall not cease’ (8:21-22). 8. Yahweh blesses N oah and bids his sons to multiply and fill the earth. He gives them com m and over all living creatures, which could be food for them w ithout restriction, provided they did not eat the ‘flesh’ (again bsr) o f a creature while it retained its blood, which stood for its ‘life’. He ordains a ban on people and on creatures o f the same species killing one another. For the hum an species he establishes a firm principle on this point: ‘W hoever sheds the blood o f mankind, by mankind shall his blood be shed’ (9:1-7). 9. Yahweh establishes a covenant w ith N oah and his descendants after him, and w ith all the creatures that ‘came out o f the ark’ (9:10). It is a covenant between him and the ‘earth’ (9:13), promising that it will never again be destroyed by flood. The ‘sign’ o f the covenant is to be the rainbow (qst, essentially qsh) in the cloud (lnn): ‘I set my bow (qsty) in the cloud (‘nn), and it shall be a sign o f the covenant between me and the earth... W hen the bow is in the cloud, I will look upon it and rem em ber the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature o f all flesh that is upon the earth’ (9:13, 16). This is not tribal legend, but pure religious m ythology. At one

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time it was part o f the stock in trade o f a mystery religion or cult, whose hidden meanings and nuances only a select group o f initiates could understand. In the light o f Arabian topography, the longhidden secrets may, perhaps, be unravelled. Here, still alive as place names, are the names o f all the principal participants — not only Yahweh and Noah, but also the ‘flesh’, the ‘ark’, the ‘cloud’ and the ‘rainbow ’: 1. Yahweh (yhwh): the name o f the God o f the H ebrew Bible survives as a place name in m any parts o f Arabia - for example Al Hayah (7 hyh), in the Asir highlands (see chapter 1). 2. N oah (nh), in this instance the name o f a god rather than that o f a people and a probable dynasty: the name survives intact as that o f the Al N aylh village (7 nyh, cf. nwh, ‘god o f settlement’, or ‘god o f the settler’) in the Asir highlands north o f Al Hayah. 3. The ‘flesh’ (bsr, cf. Arabic bsr, for ‘mankind’): there is at least one South Arabian inscription which speaks of a god called Bashar (bsr), apparently a god o f ‘living flesh’. This god must have had a consort called Basharat (bsrt, feminine form o f bsr), whose nam e was recently found in the Abha vicinity o f the Asir highlands, north o f Najran, on a rock drawing which depicted her as a cow (see Atlal, The fournal o f Saudi Arabian Archaeology, V (1981), plate 41b). O ne m ight assume, on this basis, that the god Bashar was w orshipped as a bull. The village o f Al Bashar (7 bsr), in the Asir highlands south o f Abha, continues to carry the nam e o f this god; so does Al Bashir also 7 bsr), in the southern Hijaz, where the neighbouring village o f Basharah (bsrh, bsrt) carries the nam e o f his bovine consort. 4. The ‘ark’ (in the form tbt, as in constructs and also in the attested Arabic form): there appears to have been an ancient Arabian god called Al Thabit (7 tbt), whose name survives in this form as a place name in different parts o f West Arabia. There are no less than three villages called Al Thabit in the Asir highlands, tw o o f them south o f Al Hayah (Yahweh) and Al N aylh (Noah). There are also three Arabian tribes today called Thabit. O ne o f these three tribes carries the highly indicative name o f Thabit al-Bashari, after the village in the Hijaz called Basharah (see above), which may indicate a connection between the ancient cult o f the god Al Thabit on the one hand, and the cult o f Al Bashar and his consort Basharat on the other. The verbal root tbt, in Arabic, means ‘be fixed, constant,

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Secrets o f the Bible People

stable’. N o ah ’s ‘ark’ (as tbt), allegorically, maintained its stability in the midst o f the terrifying instability o f the flood by floating on the surface o f the water. Al Thabit, it seems, was an ancient Arabian god o f ‘stability’. 5. The ‘cloud’ (‘nn ): tw o villages o f the Asir highlands, one o f them between Al Hayah and Al Thabit, are called Al ‘Aynayn (7 ‘ynyn, essentially ‘nn), which suggests that the ‘cloud’ o f the N oah m yth was no ordinary cloud, but a god (Semitic 7) in its ow n right. The name o f this cloud god is also the name o f a village o f the Y amam ah region o f Central Arabia called ‘Inan (exactly ‘nn), not far from the oasis o f U rat — the Biblical Ararat (see above). 6. The ‘rainbow ’ (qsh, Arabic qaws, unvocalized qws): Qaws, also called Qays, is am ong the best attested gods o f ancient Arabia, where his worship appears to have continued until the coming o f Islam. The Hebrew form o f his name survives as that o f the villages o f Q ushah (qsh) in the southern Hijaz, and Qlshah (also qsh) in the southern parts o f the Asir highlands. Different Arabian villages carry variant forms of his Arabic name. A m ong those is Al Q uw ays, in the Asir highlands south o f Al Hayah. A nother is Al Qays, in the Y am am ah region of Central Arabia, not far from U rat (or ‘A rarat’), and close by ‘Inan — the village o f the cloud god (see above). What follows, perhaps, is the secret o f the N oah m yth, as it was once understood by the initiates o f the m ystery cult o f Yahweh long before he became the O ne God o f latter-day Judaism and ultimately o f Christianity: At one time the cult o f the god Yahweh coexisted peacefully w ith the cults o f other gods, am ong them: Al Naylh, the god o f human settlements; Al Thabit, the god o f stability; the cloud god Al ‘Inan, the god o f torrential rain; and the rainbow god Al Qays, apparently a god o f the seasons, and hence o f agricultural fertility. A great adversary o f Yahweh, however, was Al Bashar, the bull god o f living flesh. This Al Bashar had corrupted the earth, in the sense that he had a following greater than Yahweh was willing to tolerate. His followers were apparently vegetarians w ho abstained from eating meat — a practice which Y ahweh abhorred. O ne m ight recall the otherwise inexplicable behaviour o f Yahweh in the m yth o f Cain and Abel (pp. 37-39), w here he accepted Abel’s animal sacrifice, but refused Cain’s vegetarian offering. The followers o f Al Bashar,

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moreover, in their regard for the sanctity o f all flesh as a living manifestation o f their god, did not punish murder w ith death. This must have resulted in considerable social disorganization, as issues involving m urder were left to be settled by personal and tribal vendettas outside the pale o f the law. N o w , Y ahweh decided to put an end to the cult o f Al Bashar once and for all by a_flood. For this purpose, he must have connived w ith the cloud god Al ‘Inan, the god o f torrential rain. His intention, o f course, was not to destroy ‘all flesh’, but only the cult o f ‘all flesh’; otherwise he would have been left w ith no one to follow him. Yahweh therefore devised a stratagem, for the execution o f which he secured the willing co-operation o f the two gods most interested in the survival o f mankind and other living species: Al NayTh(Noah), the god o f hum an settlements; and Al Thabit (the ‘ark’), the god o f stability. Following Yahweh’s instructions, Al Nayih built a huge ark, stored it w ith food and took aboard, w ith his ow n hum an ‘household’, paired samples o f all living creatures. In effect, Al Thabit was him self this ‘ark’ (as tbt) which floated on the surface o f the waters and carried all those on board to a safe landing after the flood had abated. W hen the earth was dry and the passengers had disembarked, they immediately offered a varied animal sacrifice to Yahweh, and he was greatly pleased w ith its odour - naturally, as it symbolized his final triumph over the vegetarian cult o f Al Bashar. To assert his victory, Yahweh immediately abrogated Al Bashar’s ban on the eating o f meat: ‘Every m oving thing that lives shall be food for you; as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything’ (9:3). Al Bashar’s ban on capital punishment for murder was also reversed: ‘W hoever sheds the blood o f mankind, by mankind shall his blood be shed.’ (9:6) Al Bashar, however, remained a god, albeit a defeated one, and some concession had to be made in recognition o f his divinity. He was a god o f ‘living flesh’, and the life in all flesh was conceived o f as being its blood. Therefore, while Yahweh ordained the eating o f all living creatures, he forbade the eating o f ‘flesh w ith its life, that is, its blood’ (9:4). Animals had to be ritually butchered and drained o f their blood, and so removed from the realm of Al Bashar, before their flesh could be eaten. In short, people were not allowed to eat gods. As it happened. Y ahweh’s trium ph in the m yth was not only over

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his adversary Al Bashar. To ensure that he overcame this particular god, Yahweh had literally taken tw o other gods for a ride on the waters o f the flood: Al Naylh, the god o f hum an settlements, and Al Thabit, the god o f stability. First, Y ahweh had played a confidence trick on Al Naylh: he had taken him aside, warned him o f the flood which he naturally feared, and persuaded him and his ‘household’ to ‘go into the ark’ (repeated twice, 7:1, 7), thereby surrendering his powers, temporarily, to Al Thabit. True to his nature as the god of stability, Al Thabit carried Al Naylh and his ‘household’ over the flood waters to a safe landing. Thereupon Yahweh told Al Naylh to ‘go forth from the ark’ (8:16), i.e. to abandon Al Thabit, which he did (repeated three times for emphasis, 8:18; 9:10, 18). By this time, Al N aylhhad been transformed from a god in his ow n right into the leader o f a band o f survivors w ho sacrificed to Yahweh. Abandoned by Al Naylh and his ‘household’, w hom he rather than Yahweh had carried over the flood waters to safety, Al Thabit suddenly found him self transformed from a god into the em pty hulk of an ark, perched in the T uw ayq mountains o f ‘A rarat’, or Urat. The beneficiary in both cases was none other than Yahweh, who now assumed the powers o f the god o f hum an settlements along with those o f the god o f stability. In the first capacity, he organized the survivors o f the flood into a new settlement and gave them their law, commanding them to ‘be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth’ (9:1). In the second capacity, he took it upon him self to regulate nature and the seasons, so that life on earth could continue forever on a stable basis (8:21-22). Having outlived their usefulness, Al Naylh and Al Thabit were left to slip into oblivion. The available Arabian inscriptions which are believed to date from about 500 BC do not appear to make any m ention o f either o f them. W ithout the help o f the cloud god Al ‘Inan, Yahweh could not have produced the flood from which he reaped all these benefits. Once the flood was over, however, Al ‘Inan also found his position compromised and his independent powers reduced. To secure the stability o f nature and the regularity o f the seasons, Yahweh had pitted against him the rainbow god o f agriculture, Al Qays — ‘my b o w ’ (qsty), as Yahweh possessively called him (9:13). By agreeing to moderate the natural ferocity o f the rain god Al ‘Inan, Al Qays, as the actual rainbow, became the mystic ‘sign’ o f the covenant between Yahweh and the earth. At one time tw in shrines for these

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two gods must have stood near the Tuw ayq mountains in the Y amam ah region, where the survivors of Y ahw eh’s flood were believed to have emerged from the ark. The sites o f these tw o shrines, as already observed, still carry the names of ‘Inan and Al Qays. In the same general vicinity lives the tribe o f Thabit al-Bashari, still carrying a clear combination o f the names o f Al Thabit and Al Bashar. What survives on the site o f this wonderful m ythology is no m ore than this handful o f names — perhaps also some archaeological remains, should the area one day be excavated. N oah and his vineyard The N o ah w ho planted a vineyard and drank himself into a state o f inebriation from its wine (9:20-24) was neither N oah the god nor N oah the com m unity or dynasty. He was N oah o f Adamah — a man o f A dam ah’ (’ys h-’dmh, 9:20), as he is introduced in the story. He m ust have come from the village in the southern highlands o f the Y emen called today al-Adamah, w ith the Arabic definite article (cf. h -’dmh, w ith the Hebrew definite article). This village is located in an area where excellent grapes are still grown. So far, the Hebrew ’ys h -’dmh has been taken to mean ‘m an o f the soil’, in the sense o f ‘farm er’ or ‘cultivator’; the expression, however, is not attested elsewhere in the Bible in this sense, nor indeed in any other. In the story about Noah o f Adamah related by Genesis, we are told that he planted a vineyard; in idiomatic Hebrew, ‘he began (w-yhl) and planted (w -yt“) a vineyard.’ In the idiomatic Arabic I speak, I w ould say, ‘he got up and planted a vineyard. ’ The Hebrew ‘began’, like the Arabic ‘got u p ’, is here no more than an auxiliary verb emphasizing the initiative involved in the action. The complete sentence w ith which the story o f N oah and his vineyard starts says nothing m ore than this: ‘Noah, a man o f Adamah, began and planted a vineyard’ (w-yhl nh ’ys h-’dmh w -yt' krm). The sentence does not say w hat the standing translations o f the original Hebrew would have us believe: ‘N oah was the first tiller o f the soil; he planted a vineyard.’ The N oah o f Adamah was neither the first man to take up farming, nor the first man to plant a vineyard. Certainly this is not w hat the story about him says. The complete story, in its original version, must have run more or less as follows: having planted a vineyard, N oah o f Adamah became drunk from its wine, and lay naked and unconscious in his

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tent. His youngest son (9:24), on entering the tent, discovered him in this state and w ent and told his older brothers about it. The brothers, apparently scandalized, entered the tent in their turn, walking backwards (9:23), and w ithout looking, covered their father’s nakedness w ith a garment. When the man awoke from his drunkenness and learned what had happened, he railed curses against his youngest son for having seen him at his worst. Stories about men with a taste for drink w ho undertake the commercial manufacture o f wines, brews or spirits, but end up as the chief consumers o f their ow n produce, are fairly com m on. The original story o f N oah o f Adamah must have been a folk tale o f this kind which was current in ancient Arabia. Considering that the comic hero o f this folk tale was called Noah, it was only natural that his identity came to be confused with that o f the eponym ous ancestor o f the N oah people or dynasty — the legendary ‘father’ o f the Shem, H am and Japheth folk. At some point, an Israelite story-teller m ust have picked up this tale and developed it to explain w hy one branch o f the H am folk — the Canaanites — had come to be regarded as the social inferiors o f other N oah peoples, notably those o f the Shem and Japheth folk. It was the Israelites themselves, o f course, w ho had reduced the Canaanites o f West Arabia to a subject people by outright conquest, as Biblical history attests. For the Canaanites as an ancient people originally from West Arabia, I refer the reader to the relevant passages in The Bible Came from Arabia. In the Israelite version o f the story o f N oah o f Adamah, which is the only one we actually find in the Bible, w hat is said is the following: the N oah o f Adamah w ho planted a vineyard and drank himself into inebriation from its wine was none other than the patriarchal N oah w ho was the father o f Shem, H am and Japheth. The son w ho saw his father lying drunk and naked in his tent, but did nothing about it, was Ham. Those w ho were discreet and covered the nakedness o f their father w ithout looking were Shem and Japheth. When N oah was sober again and discovered w hat his youngest son (understood here to refer to Ham) had done, he cursed Canaan, w ho was reportedly one o f H a m ’s four ‘sons’ (10:6), pronouncing that he shall be ‘a slave o f slaves’ to his kin — in particular to his ‘brothers’ (not ‘uncles’) Shem and Japheth. O n the other hand he invoked G od’s blessings on Shem and Japheth.

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This version o f the story, as we read it in the standing text o f Genesis, is definitely a doctored one. This is clearly indicated by one im portant omission: the failure to delete the expression his youngest son from the text o f the original version. Wherever the three ‘sons’ of N oah are mentioned in Genesis, they are invariably listed as Shem, Ham and Japheth, the implication being that Japheth, not Ham, was the youngest o f the three. M oreover, if Noah, as the ‘father’ o f the three, cursed Canaan when ‘he knew w hat his youngest son had done to h im ’, the person w ho looked upon his nudity would have been his ‘grandson’ Canaan, not his ‘son’ Ham. M ost probably Canaan had featured in the original version o f the story, not as the eponymous ancestor o f the Biblical Canaanites, but simply as the prankish youngest son o f the wine-bibbing N oah ofAdamah. Where the original version had probably said, ‘Canaan saw the nakedness o f his father, and told his brothers outside’, a carefully doctored version should have made it read: ‘Canaan saw the nakedness o f his grandfather and told his uncles outside. ’ However, the version was clumsily changed to read: ‘Ham, the father o f Canaan, saw the nakedness o f his father... ’ (9:22). The guilt here lies clearly w ith Ham, not w ith his ‘son’ Canaan, w ho was not his only son, but reportedly the last o f four (10:6). Yet, in the carelessly redacted story, it was Canaan, not Ham, nor any o f H am ’s three other ‘sons’, w ho was cursed and condemned to eternal slavery by the man assumed to have been his grandfather, for a guilt which was his father’s, not his own! In any case the original story o f N oah o f Adamah m ust have ended as follows: ‘W hen N oah awoke from his wine and knew what his youngest son had done, he said, “Cursed be Canaan!”’ (9:24-25a). In the version immortalized in Genesis, this expression o f playful anger, addressed by a father w ho knew he should have behaved better, to a son w ho was more amused than scandalized by his father’s weakness for wine, was interpreted literally as a damnation. Hence NoaH is made to say (9:25): Cursed be Canaan: He shall be a slave o f slaves to his kin! The Redactor here adds (9:26-27): He said: ‘T he blessed of Yahweh, m y God, is Shem;

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Let Canaan be a slave to him! M ay God be magnanimous (ypt, be spacious) to Japheth; Let him dwell in the tents o f Shem; Let Canaan be a slave to him!’ Earlier in this chapter it was observed that the names o f the ‘sons’ o f the N oah o f legend, Shem (sm) and Japheth (ypt), survive today in the southern hill country o f the Y emen as those o f the village o f Shumm (sm) and the ridge o f Jabal Wafit (u>pt). Actually, Jabal WafTt is located in the immediate vicinity o f Shumm . T he Japheth tribe o f the mountain, and the Shem tribe o f the village, must have been close neighbours, sharing w hat was, in effect, the same territory. Whoever made the final redaction o f the story o f N oah o f Adamah and his vineyard, draining it o f the last bit o f its original hum our, must have know n this fact. In terms o f the geography o f the Yemen, Japheth, in a way, did live in the ‘tents o f Shem ’!

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3 T he Tower o f Babel

All the earth was one language; one set o f words. As they migrated from the east, they reached a plain in the land o f Shinar and settled there. They said to one another: ‘Com e, let us make brick; let us fire it hard.’ Brick was to them for stone, and bitum en to them was for coating. They said: ‘Com e, let us build ourselves a city, and a tow er w ith its top in the skies. Let us give ourselves a name, so w e w ould not be dispersed in the w o rld .’ Y ahweh came dow n to see the city, and the tow er which mankind had built. Y ahweh said: ‘Here is one people; one language for all o f them; and this is the beginning o f their enterprise. N o w nothing will be impossible for them o f w hat they devise to make. Com e, let us go dow n there and confound their language, so they w ould not understand one another’s speech.’

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BABYLON

Roniw of m i g r a t i o n

The Tower o f Babel

Yahweh dispersed them from there in the world, and they ceased building the city. Therefore its name is called Babel (bbl), because Yahweh there confounded (bll) the language o f the world; from there Yahweh dispersed them in the world. I have taken the liberty o f making m y ow n translation o f the Biblical story o f the T ow er o f Babel (Genesis 11:1-9) not only to bring out the cadence o f the original Hebrew verse, but also to highlight its nuances and reveal its composite structure. As I see it tw o different stories are fused together here. The first is a m yth which explains w hy people in the w orld speak different languages. The second is a historical account o f the migration o f different peoples from the ‘east’ to a land called Shinar, where they set out to build a fortified city and organize themselves as a unified political com m unity around it, but were dispersed before they were able to complete their work. Whoever put these two stories together was a skilled redactor, and for this reason the Biblical Tow er o f Babel story, as it stands, can easily pass for one story at first glance. It is only upon closer scrutiny that the seams between its tw o original com ponent parts begin to show. Let us stop to consider where this is the case. First, there is no direct logical connection between the tw o opening verses o f the story. The first speaks o f mankind on the earth in general, and the original unity o f language among them; the second disregards the general and concentrates on the particular, to tell o f the migration o f a random grouping o f people from one place to another. It is not indicated that this immigration involved all the people on earth. Second, the people w ho migrated from the ‘east’ to settle in the land o f Shinar are left unidentified. I imagine that something must have been said about their identity in the older text which spoke o f their migration. From the third verse we learn that they came from a place where people were accustomed to building w ith brick and bitumen. In the fourth verse it is implied that the immigrants to the land o f Shinar were not originally one unified tribe, as they had to devise for themselves a com m on name to keep them together in the territory w here they arrived to settle. In the fifth verse, however,

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the builders o f the ‘city’ and the ‘tow er’ in the land o f Shinar are simply called ‘the sons o f A dam ’ (bny ’dm) — another term for ‘m ankind’. From the particular and apparently historical, the Genesis story suddenly switches back to the general and the mythical, as in the opening verse. Third, there is a serious and obvious linguistic flaw in the last verse, where a curiously inappropriate etym ology is suggested for the place name ‘Babel’ (bbl, Akkadian Bab-ili or bb 7, ‘Gate o f G od’). This name is explained as a derivation from the H ebrew balal (bll, ‘confuse, confound’), which is an entirely different word. For the name o f the place in question to mean ‘confound’, which is what the story indicates, it ought to have been something like Balal (in any case, bll) rather than Babel. There m ust have been some reason, however, for the story to have cited the nam e as Babel. Perhaps Babel had featured in the original account o f the migration from the ‘east’ to the land o f Shinar. I shall assume that this is w hat actually happened and attem pt a reconstruction o f w hat was originally said o f this migration as follows: As people from Babel migrated from the east, they reached a plain in the land o f Shinar and settled there. They said to one another: ‘Come, let us make brick; let us fire it hard.’ Brick was to them for stone, and bitumen was to them for coating. They said: ‘Com e, let us build ourselves a city, and a tow er w ith its top in the skies. Let us give ourselves a name, so we w ould not be dispersed in the w o rld .’ Yahweh dispersed them from there in the world, and they ceased building the city. From there Yahweh dispersed them in the world. O n the other hand, here is what could have been the original text o f the language m yth which Genesis fuses w ith the above story: All the earth was one language;

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one set o f words. Y ahweh said: ‘Here is one people; one language for all o f them. N o w , nothing will be impossible for them o f w hat they devise to do. Com e, let us go dow n there and confound their language, so they w ould not understand one another’s speech.’ Therefore that place is called Balal (bll), because Yahweh there confounded (bll) the language o f the world. The tw o stories seem to me to be completely different, treating tw o different subjects. In the Genesis text the artificial fusion between them is introduced essentially by one intruding verse (9:5), intro­ duced for the purpose by whoever first put the tw o stories together. It is, in fact, the same verse in which the switch in the com-posite text is made from the particular to the general, as observed above: Yahweh came dow n to see the city, and the tow er which mankind had built. T o strengthen further the fusion between the tw o stories, some redactor, I believe, did three other things. First, he suppressed the name ‘Babel’ from the first verse o f the first story (Genesis 11:2), and changed the name ‘Balal’ to ‘Babel’ in the last verse o f the second story (11:9). N ext, he took the second verse o f the second story (11:5) and interpolated in it an additional sentence: ‘and this is the beginning o f their enterprise’, in reference to the building o f the city and the tow er by the immigrants to Shinar, which legitimately belongs to the first story. Finally, he took the last sentence o f the last verse o f the first story and attached it to the last verse o f the second (11:9). This was the result, the attached sentence indicated in italics: Therefore, its name is called Babel (bbl), because Yahweh there confounded (bll) the language o f the world. From there Yahweh dispersed them in the world.

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Even if one were to insist that what is in question here is one story, not two, and that the city the story speaks o f was called ‘Babel’, not ‘Balal’, the fact remains that this ‘Babel’ could not have been the Babylon o f ancient M esopotamia - the city o f the ‘hanging gardens’, one o f the seven wonders o f the ancient world, and whose ruins can still be seen near the m odern tow n o f Hillah, on the Euphrates river in southern Iraq. Firstly, the land o f Shinar, to which the immigrants from the ‘east’ arrived to start building a city, could not have been southern Iraq. According to the story, the immigrants ‘reached a plain (bq'h) in the land o f Shinar and settled there’. So far, Biblical scholars have firmly maintained that the Biblical Shinar (sn'r ) was the Sumerian Shingi-Uri (sngr), and the Akkadian Sha-an-kha-ra (snhr), today the ridge o f Jabal Sinjar (sngr), in northern Iraq, at a flying distance of no less than 540 kilometres from the site o f ancient Babylon. What they suggest, and even affirm, is that the ancient Israelites took the Akkadian name o f this Jabal Sinjar, transformed it into Shin'ar, or ‘Shinar’, and applied it to the whole o f Mesopotamia, including its southern parts, where ancient Babylon once stood. Apart from the fact that the identification o f the Biblical Shin'ar w ith the Akkadian Sha-an-kha-ra and the Sumerian Shingi-Uri is linguistically arguable, if not untenable, one has also to bear the following in mind: in southern M esopotamia the im migrants to ‘Shinar’ w ould not have had to ‘reach a plain’ in which to settle. The whole country is a plain, as flat as flat can be. O bviously the ‘Babel’ o f our story must have been located in a ‘Shinar’ o f rugged highlands, where ‘plains’ for settlement had to be searched for. The territory o f Babylon in southern M esopotamia was no such place. There follow tw o other matters to consider. First, the story makes a point o f explaining that the im migrants w ho reached a plain in the land o f Shinar and settled there, set out to build a city w ith brick instead o f stone, specifically because they were accustomed to building w ith brick instead o f stone. This implies that stone for building was not available in the country o f the ‘east’ from which they emigrated, while it was available in the land o f Shinar where they arrived to settle, yet they did not use it. In the alluvial land o f southern M esopotamia, stone is not readily available for building. Second, the Genesis story makes clear that the settlers in the land o f Shinar were dispersed in the w orld before they had completed the

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building o f their city. This alone, to me, argues strongly against the city in question being the Babylon o f ancient Mesopotamia — one of the greatest cities o f antiquity and twice the seat o f powerful empires, whose construction could hardly be described as having been abandoned before completion, even in legend. In the days of the ancient Israelites, Babylon was a magnificent city by the standards o f the time, standing there for all to see. For the sake o f argument, then, let us proceed on the assumption that in the Biblical story o f the T ow er o f Babel we have a fusion o f tw o different stories; w e shall examine the content o f each story separately. The im m ig ran t c o m m u n ity o f Shinar The migration to the land o f Shinar, the first story says, began ‘from the east’ (m-qdtn, 11:2), w here the emigrants were used to building with brick and bitum en (11:3b). This could point to Mesopotamia not as the land where the emigrants arrived to settle, but as their land o f origin. As already indicated, the southern part of Mesopotamia is a land o f alluvial deposits where no stone is available for building. There, also, natural seepages o f bitumen have always been found at H it — a to w n on the Euphrates less than 200 kilometres upstream from the site o f ancient Babylon. The immigrants, as I have already suggested, could have actually come from the vicinity o f Babylon, which w ould explain the confusion between the names ‘Babel’ (bbl) and ‘Balal’ (bll) in the Genesis text under consideration. The emigrants to the land o f Shinar definitely arrived ‘from the east’, although translators so far have taken the unw arranted liberty of taking the original H ebrew m-qdm in this story to mean ‘eastwards’, which in H ebrew w ould be qdmh. In the H ebrew m-qdm, the prefixed particle m (variant o f mn) can only mean ‘from ’, and cannot mean ‘to ’ or ‘tow ards’. If the emigrants originally came from the ‘east’, and their country o f origin was lower Mesopotamia, it follows that the land o f Shinar, w here they arrived to settle, must have been located somewhere to the west o f Iraq: either directly to the west, in Syria, or m ore to the south-west, in Arabia. O n the map southern Iraq appears to be closer to Syria than to Arabia. Before the days of m odern transport, however, it was n o t easy to cross the intervening desert directly. To reach southern Syria from southern Iraq, one would have had to take a long detour through N o rth Arabia. O n

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the other hand, the route from southern Iraq to the Hijaz, in West Arabia, is direct. From the banks o f the Euphrates, south-east o f Babylon, it follows the course o f Wadi al-Batin, upstream through Wadi al-Rimmah, whose numerous tributaries lead further upstream to different points in the Hijaz, spanning the area between Medina and Taif (see map p. 64). The connection between southern Iraq and the Hijaz has always existed historically. In Islamic times whatever happened in the Hijaz had immediate repercussions in southern Iraq; and the reverse was equally true. For uncounted centuries, tribes are know n to have migrated from one area to the other, and such migrations are probably as old as time. In fact the west bank o f the Euphrates may be described, in terms o f historical geography, as the northern end o f Arabia in the direction o f the east. This could explain a num ber o f things in the history o f ancient M esopotamia which remain uncertain. For example, the founder o f the first Babylonian empire, Sargon the Great, is described in the M esopotam ian records as the king o f ‘Agade’ — usually identified as the place name Akkadi or A kkad (’kd), which appears not only in the Babylonian records but also in the Bible (as ’kd, vocalized Akkad, Genesis 10:10). So far, the location o f this Agade, or Akkad, remains uncertain, and the fact that tw o different names are involved may well mean that Agade was one place, and Akkad another. O ne could reasonably entertain the possibility that Sargon’s Agade (’gd) is today the village o f Waqid (wqd), in the Hail region o f N o rth Arabia, about 500 kilometres south o f the site o f Babylon; that Akkad or Akkadi (’kd), o f the Hebrew Bible and the Babylonian records, an altogether different place, is today the village o f Wakid (wkd), in the T aif highlands o f the Hijaz. O ne w ould have to excavate there, however, before venturing to affirm such guesses. In the Assyrian records, to take another example, Chaldea (kaldu, or kid) features as the name o f a place or territory in the extreme south o f Assyria (i.e. northern Iraq). It was allegedly the original home o f the ‘Chaldean’ dynasty which ruled the second Babylonian empire. So far it has been assumed that Chaldea comprised those parts o f southern M esopotamia lying dow nstream from Babylon. Such a Chaldea, however, w ould lie south-east rather than south o f Babylonia and Assyria. M ore directly to the south from there, one would arrive at the southern Hijaz and Asir, in West Arabia. Again,

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one w ould have to excavate before rejecting the seemingly outrageous suggestion that Chaldea (kid), rather than being in lower Mesopotamia, could have been the present village o f Kalada’ (kid’, or kid), in the T aif highlands o f the southern Hijaz. The names, certainly, are identical. Moreover, this suggestion is not as outrageous as it seems. As early as 1926 one scholar, B. Moritz, proposed that the Chaldeans could have come from South Arabia. More recently in 1952, W.F. Albright thought that they came from ‘an undetermined part o f East Arabia’. Then in 1968, J. A. Brinkman, writing on the Chaldeans, stated: ‘W hat slim evidence is presently available suggests a West Semitic relationship for the Chaldeans and possibly some kinship w ith the Arameans.’ West Arabia abounds in ancient Aramaic inscriptions; so m y own suggestion that the Chaldeans o f M esopotam ia could have taken their name from a place of origin called Kalada’ in the Hijaz is not so absurd after all. Whatever the truth may be regarding the question o f Agade, Akkad and Chaldea, I am convinced that the Biblical land o f Shinar was now here in Iraq. It was in the same Taif highlands where Wakid (my suggested ‘A kkad’) and Kalada’ (my suggested ‘Chaldea’) are found. Here the nam e ‘Shinar’, which is actually Shin‘ar (sn‘r), survives as Shara‘in (sr'n) — the name o f one o f the many villages o f the fertile valley o f Wadi Kilakh. This must have been the ‘plain’ which the M esopotam ian immigrants ‘reached’ after their long journey following the course o f Wadi al-Rimmah ‘from the east’, and where they decided to ‘settle’ and build a city o f ‘brick’ in the M esopotamian manner. It is possible that they had intended to give this city the name o f ‘Babel’, after the M esopotamian Babel, or Babylon. We are distinctly told, however, that they were ‘dispersed’ by Yahweh before the construction o f their city was completed. In the language o f legend this would mean that their settlement in Wadi Kilakh, in the vicinity o f a Shinar, today’s Shara‘in, was attacked and destroyed by a people o f the locality who happened to be Y ahweh worshippers — perhaps the people o f Al H aw a’ ('/ h w ’), in the Bani Malik highlands south o f that valley, whose village still carries the name o f the god Yahweh. In traditional societies, immigrants are rarely made welcome unless they establish themselves by force. In any case the M esopotam ian immigrants never completed the building o f their city o f ‘Babel’ in Wadi Kilakh. There is certainly no place by this name in the region today.

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South o f Shara‘in and Wadi Kilakh, however, in the same Bani Malik highlands where the village o f Al H aw a’, or the ‘God Y ahw eh’, can be found, there is another village which is still called Al Balal (bll) — a name which, in Hebrew, w ould mean ‘confusion’, from bll as a verb meaning ‘confound, confuse’. This brings us to our next story. T he language m y th The name o f the village o f Al Balal, in the T aif highlands, does not simply mean ‘confusion’. As 7 bll, it actually means ‘god o f confusion’. In H ebrew there are tw o w ords for ‘language’. The one used in the story o f the ‘T ow er o f Babel’ is safah (sph, Arabic shafah, or sph, meaning ‘lip’); and the other is lashon (Isn, or Iswn, Arabic lisan, or Isn, ‘tongue’). In ancient West Arabia, there was a god of language as well as a god o f confusion. While the second was called Al Balal, the first was called Al Shafi (7 spy, cf. sph), and also Al Lisan (7 Isn, cf. Isn). His name in both its forms is carried to this day by tw o villages o f the Asir highlands south o f Taif. Add the god Yahweh and mankind to the god o f language (I shall call him Al Lisan) and the god o f confusion (Al Balal), and we have the four characters o f a fascinating myth. The benevolent god o f language, Al Lisan, gives mankind one speech and one vocabulary, to enable the people o f the earth to understand and co-operate w ith one another. Yahweh, ever anxious to consolidate his pow er over mankind and over the other gods, is alarmed by this. He particularly fears that mankind, united by one language, w ould be able to achieve all ends w ithout his help, and so slip from his control. Yahweh therefore turns for help to Al Balal, the malevolent god o f confusion, w ho confounds the language o f mankind, so that the people o f earth cease to understand one another. According to the m yth, the place where this happened came to be called ‘Balal’, which is today Al Balal in the T aif region By pitting Al Balal against Al Lisan and playing on the natural rivalry between them, Yahweh, o f course, gained another benefit: he neutralized the antithetical powers o f these tw o gods, for his ow n aggrandizement, trium phing yet again as a god over other gods in the Arabian pantheon. So m uch for the story o f the ‘T ow er o f Babel’ as myth; yet it contains an aspect which may be considered historical legend.

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Ancient West Arabia, where the m yth is set, was a highway connecting the civilizations o f the Indian Ocean and Red Sea basins w ith the w orld o f the eastern Mediterranean basin. The whole o f peninsular Arabia, in fact, was a netw ork of highways connecting different lands and cultures. As such it was a real crossroads o f ancient nations and tongues, which converged by land or by sea from various directions: a fact reflected by the polyglot nature o f the names o f places and tribes in Arabia even today, particularly in West Arabia. These names have been left behind by the many peoples w ho lived side by side in the area at one time, some speaking Canaanite dialects such as Hebrew; others Aramaic, Akkadian, Arabic, ancient Egyptian, ancient South Arabian and Ethiopic, and perhaps other languages as well. M ost o f these tongues were closely related, yet mutually unintelligible. The vocabulary they shared was not only pronounced differently; it also included many w ords that had altered shades o f meaning, ranging even to opposite, between one language or dialect and another. For example, the w ord for ‘sit’ in, say, H ebrew and ancient South Arabian meant (and still means) ‘j u m p ’ in Arabic; the w ord for ‘fall’ in Hebrew and some dialects o f Arabic meant ‘rise’, even ‘soar’, in other Arabic dialects. This was a real confusion o f tongues, and the m yth at hand offers a genial explanation. At one time there was one language and one vocabulary for the world, which was the gift o f the god Al Lisan; but Y ahweh did not wish it to remain that way. Therefore, he made the god Al Balal confound the language o f mankind. The event took place in the T aif region o f West Arabia, where main highways from every part o f the peninsula met and crossed. Little w onder that the obscure village o f Al Balal, which still carries the name o f the forgotten god o f confusion, survives in that same region as the principal clue to the myth.

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4 T he Abrams Who Were N o t Abraham

To establish the identity o f a person, name, ethnicity and place o f normal residence are o f prim ary importance. In the so-called patriarchal narratives o f Genesis, A braham goes by tw o names: he is first called Abram (11:27 -17:5), then his name changes to Abraham. He is also spoken o f as living in different places. People, o f course, may change their names; they may also change their places o f residence, m ore frequently if they happen to be nomadic. With ethnicity, however, it is a different matter; one cannot have tw o origins. A braham could not have been a ‘H ebrew ’ and an ‘A ramean’ at the same time. The standing text o f Genesis first introduces Abraham (under the name Abram) as a descendant o f Eber (‘by), the great-grandson o f Shem (sm ) (11:10-27); elsewhere, his great-grandfather Eber features as the eponym ous ancestor o f all the ‘Eber people’ (bny 'br, 10:21). In one instance Abraham (again as Abram) is distinctly identified as a ‘H ebrew ’ (‘bry, 14:13). At first glance this could mean simply that he belonged to the Eber ( ‘br) folk. Abraham, however, both as ‘A bram ’ and as ‘A braham ’, is said to have had a brother called N ahor, and the son and grandson o f this N ahor are repeatedly described as being ‘A ramean’ (’rmy, RSV 25:20; 28:5; 31:20, 24); N ah o r’s grandson, in fact, is even made to utter tw o words o f pure Aramaic (31:47). Abraham, o f course, could not have had a brother w ho was ‘A ram ean’ unless he was an ‘A ram ean’ himself. If that was the case, he could not also have been a ‘H ebrew ’. This means that the rambling

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Genesis story o f Abraham confuses at least tw o different strains o f lore about tw o different characters, one ‘Aramean’, the other ‘H ebrew ’. In the composite story both characters begin as Abrams and end up as Abrahams. To disentangle the different strains o f the A braham story, let us tag one o f the Abrahams and find out in w hat parts o f the story he fits. We can begin with Genesis 14, the only place where Abraham is distinctly called Abram the Hebrew, to determine w hat attributes are given to him in that particular text, and label him accordingly. A bram the H ebrew In Genesis 14, Abraham, as Abram the Hebrew, comes closest to being a historically plausible figure. He is a local or tribal chief who has a retinue o f trained fighters (14:14); he leads them expertly in warfare (14:15) to vindicate his kin (14:13-16), and is solicitous o f the interests o f his allies (14:13, 24). He is magnanimous (14:24), but also wily and circumspect in political bargaining (14:21-23); people o f high station treat him with honour and respect (14:17-20). Beyond the fact that he reveres the god El Elyon (7 'lywn, frequently rendered ‘God M ost H ig h’, 14:22), he does not appear to have been a man o f God in any special way. I do not propose to retell the story o f Genesis 14, which one may easily consult in the original (see also The Bible Came from Arabia, chapter 12). W hat is im portant for the purposes o f our present experiment is that Abram the Hebrew, in this story, is given tw o distinct attributes by which he can be identified and labelled: 1. He lived in the w ood o f M am re (’Iny mrnr’, 14:13). Mamre, it is explained, was his ally and confederate, know n as M am re the Amorite, brother o f tw o other allies, Eshcol and Aner. This is the only place where these details about M am re are given. 2. He has a nephew (bn ’h, ‘brother’s son’, 14:12) or ‘kinsm an’ (’h, ‘brother, kinsm an’, 14:12, 16) called Lot, w ho lived in Sodom. There are tw o other episodes in the Genesis story where Abraham (as Abram, or as Abraham) features as both a resident o f Mamre, and as a man w ho is somehow closely associated w ith Lot. In Genesis 13:5-12, the story tells how Abram and Lot, w ho were at first living in close proximity, agreed to part company because o f the strife

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between their respective herdsmen, Lot leaving Abram and going to settle in Sodom. A t the end o f the story we find Abram living in the w ood o f M amre, which is identified as being located in H ebron (13:18). Here, for the first time, we meet Abram the Hebrew true to type. He is a political realist w ho is anxious to avoid conflict w ith his ‘kinsm an’, so he takes the initiative in suggesting that they part company (13:8); he is also magnanimous, giving his kinsman the first choice o f the land he wished to claim (13:9). We have a further story told about Abram (this time as Abraham) in Genesis 18 and 19. The setting is again in the w ood o f M am re (18:1). O n this occasion Abraham is reportedly warned o fY ah w eh ’s anger against Sodom and G om orrah (18:16-22), and becomes gravely concerned about the safety o f Lot and his family in Sodom (18:22-33; 19:27-28). Here again we see A bram the Hebrew, solicitous about his kinsman, driving a hard bargain, this time reportedly w ith Yahweh, to secure L ot’s well-being (18:23-32). Abram, again as Abraham, is once m ore in the vicinity o f M am re in Genesis 23. His wife has recently died in Kiriath-arba, identified as H ebron, and A braham is anxious to secure for her a decent burial. Again, true to type as the dow n-to-earth Abram the Hebrew, the man makes a great exhibition o f his bargaining skills as he sets out to negotiate w ith the inhabitants o f the area the purchase o f the cave of Machpelah, east o f Mamre, as a burial site for his family (23:3-18). When Abraham died, he was reportedly interred in the same place (25:9). Granting the historicity o f the event, I would say that the A braham w ho was buried in the cave o f Machpelah, near Mamre, was none other than Abram the Hebrew. In The Bible Came from Arabia, I identified the Biblical M amre (immr’) as being present-day N am irah (nmr), in the hinterland o f the coastal tow n o f Q unfudhah, in West Arabia. The Hebron (hbrwn) of that vicinity is called today Khirban (hrbn). I would not have been so certain, had it not been for the existence o f a Machpelah (mkplh) and a Kiriath-arba (qryt ’rb‘, ‘villages o f four’, or ‘four villages’) in the same vicinity, which I visited. Those are today Maqfalah (mqplh) and the ‘four’ ( ’rb1) villages (qryt) o f Q aryat (qryt) Al SUan, Q aryat al-Shiyab, Q aryat ‘Asiyah, and Q aryat ‘Amir. N o other cluster o f ‘four villages’ w ith construct names, the first part o f the nam e o f each village being exactly Qaryat, is found anywhere else in the Near East. N o r have I been able to spot the name o f Machpelah in any

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other Near Eastern region. The geographical accuracy o f this story apart, Abram the Hebrew need not have been a historical person; he could have been the eponym ous hero o f a H ebrew tribe called the Abram, w ho was made to act and speak consistently as a man by master story-tellers. Let us assume, for the m om ent, that this was actually the case. If he was a tribe, it is possible that his name (Biblical ’brm) survives as that of the village o f Burm ah (brm), in the same Q undfudhah hinterland where ‘M am re’, ‘H ebron’, ‘Kiriath-arba’ and ‘Machpelah’ are found. In that same region there is a valley called Wadi H arun (hrn). According to Genesis 11:27, 31, L ot’s ‘father’, w ho was a ‘brother’ o f A bram ’s, was called Haran (hrn), which is precisely the name of this valley. L ot’s ow n name (Biblical Iwt) survives in the same area as that o f the village o f Lit (lyt), near a Sodom (sdm) which still exists as present-day Sudumah (sdm). This indicates that Lot was not so m uch a ‘nephew ’ or ‘kinsm an’ to A bram the Hebrew, but a tribe which was considered to be o f the same stock as the H ebrew Abram tribe. Where Lot features as the nephew o f Abram in episodes other than the tw o mentioned above, it is invariably in clumsy interpolations, such as ‘and Lot w ent w ith him ’ (12:4), or ‘and Lot w ith him ’ (13:1). Lot’s ‘father’ Haran, w ho was the ‘brother’ of Abram the H ebrew only, and not o f the other Abram or Abrams, had to be explained away in some manner. For this reason he is made to die at the beginning o f the composite Genesis saga of Abraham (11:28), so that his continued presence w ould not raise awkward questions. A bram the A ram ean As w ith the case o f A bram the Hebrew, we have to tag Abram the Aramean to be able to spot him in the different episodes o f the Abraham story. This task is m ore difficult because there is no specific passage in Genesis which actually speaks o f ‘A bram the Aramean’. However, we know that there was an Aramean Abram, because N ahor, w ho features as A bram ’s ‘brother’ in Genesis 11:27, had Aramean (even Aramaic-speaking) descendants. We may assume, therefore, that the A bram w ho features in the first episode o f the Abraham story (Genesis 11 and 12) was A bram the Aramean. Here are his attributes:

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1. He had a ‘brother’ called N ahor (11:27, 29). 2. He migrated w ith this ‘father’ and his ‘brother’ N ahor from their native U r Kasdim w ith the intention o f settling in the land of Canaan, but the family stopped in Haran (here hrn, not hrn) and settled there instead (11:31). 3. After the death o f his ‘father’, Abram was commanded by Yahweh to part company w ith his folk and emigrate from Haran under his divine guidance (12:1), promising to make o f him a great nation (12:2). As soon as he arrived in the ‘land o f Canaan’ (12:5), he built an altar to Yahweh (12:7). 4. In the ‘land o f Canaan’, initially he stopped at Shechem (12:6), then in the w ood o f M oreh (’Iwn mwrh, 12:6), until he settled, ‘in the m ountain east o f Bethel... w ith Bethel to the west and Ai to theeast’ (12:8). 5. From this last place, he journeyed on and w ent to the Negeb (12:9). From this inform ation we discover three labels by which we can identify the person o f Abram the Aramean: first, he was the ‘brother’ o f Nahor; second, he was a devotee o f Yahweh, acting on his commands; third, the area w here he finally arrived to settle included places called Shechem, M oreh, Bethel, Ai and the Negeb. Keeping the distinct attributes o f Abram the Aramean in mind, we can proceed to observe where his person reappears in the Genesis story under consideration: 1. In Genesis 13:2-4, an A bram w ho is rich in ‘cattle, in silver, and in gold’ leaves the Negeb and returns to the place between Bethel and Ai where he had lived earlier; there he builds an altar and sacrifices to Yahweh. He is beyond doubt Abram the Aramean. 2. In Genesis 15:7, Yahweh reminds Abram that he had brought him out o f U r Kasdim. This statement, being irrelevant to the context in which it appears, could be an interpolation. The Abram o f Genesis 15, as we shall subsequently discover, had nothing to do w ith Abram the Aramean. In any case, it was A bram ’s ‘father’, not Yahweh, who had led A bram the Aramean out o f U r Kasdim (11:31). Yahweh had only brought him out o f Haran (12:1). In short, the conversion o f this Abram to the cult o f Yahweh must have occurred at Haran (see below).

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3. In Genesis 22:20-24, in a passage which stands out as artificially attached to that preceding it, we are told that someone brought news to Abraham about the progeny o f his ‘brother’ Nahor. The Abraham w ho reportedly received this news could only have been A bram the Aramean. 4. In Genesis 24:1-61, we are told how A braham sent his most trusted servant to his ‘country’ and his ‘kindred’ to take a wife for his son. The servant reportedly proceeded to the Aram o f Naharaim (see below), which was the city o f A braham ’s ‘brother’ N ahor, and took one o f N ah o r’s grand-daughters as a wife for his m aster’s son. Here also the Abraham w ho sent his servant on this perfectly understandable mission could only have been A bram the Aramean. From Genesis 31:47, as already observed, we learn that N ah o r’s descendants spoke Aramaic, not Hebrew. From Genesis 31:19, 32, 35, we further learn that, unlike their kinsman Abram and his descendants, they were not worshippers o f Yahweh, but had their ow n household gods, which were ‘idols’ (trpym ). This may imply that Abram parted company w ith his ‘country and kindred’ following his conversion to the cult o f Yahweh, apparently in Haran (see above). A change o f religion is usually a good cause for migration; certainly it is an understandable one in a tribal society where com m on religion is an im portant bond. But where did Abram the Aramean originally come from, and w hat were the actual stages o f his migration? In Genesis he starts off w ith his ‘father’ from U r Kasdim, then continues on his own from Haran. From there he moves to Shechem, then to the wood o f M oreh, then to the ‘m ountain’ between Bethel and Ai. His prospering cattle business takes him for a time to the N egeb, after which he returns to his former place o f settlement between Bethel and Ai — apparently the one where he came to be domiciled. Regardless o f m y earlier identification o f some o f these places in The Bible Came from Arabia, let me now identify all o f them, after further research, as follows (see map p. 128): 1. U r (’wr), the native land o f Abram the Aramean, m ust have been the fertile ridge o f Jabal A w r (exactly ’wr), sometimes referred to as U w arah (also ’wr), and called today Ayar (’yr), south o f Medina in the central Hijaz. The different historical and present forms o f the

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name o f the ridge are dialectal and merely a matter o f pronunciation. In Genesis this U r is identified as U r Kasdim, traditionally rendered in translation as ‘U r o f the Chaldees’. Actually, Kasdim (ksdym, which I w ould vocalize in this context as Kasdayim, dual rather than plural o f ksd) could only have been today’s Qudsan (Arabic dual o f qds, metathesis o f ksd), the tw in ridges which dominate the countryside south o f Medina, where Jabal Awr, the Biblical ‘U r Kasdim’, is located. 2. Haran (hrn), the first stop o f Abram the Aramean after his departure w ith his ‘father’ and his ‘brother’ N ahor from their native Ur, or Jabal Awr, carries the same name as the present village of Khlrin (hrn), south-w est o f Taif, along the main highway from Medina to the southern parts o f the Hijaz. 3. Aram-naharaim ( ’rm nhrym, or the Aram o f nhrym), w here his ‘brother’ N ahor and his descendants stayed, is not ‘M esopotam ia’ as usually rendered, but the village o f Naharin (nhryn), in the same Taif region. 4. Considering that the migration o f Abram and his Aramean kin from U r to Haran was apparently in a southerly direction, one m ight assume that Abram, w hen he parted company with his Aramean kin, proceeded to migrate further to the south. In this case, M oreh (mwrh), his first stop alone, could have been the present village o f M arawah (mrwh), in the Zahran highlands o f the southern Hijaz south o f Khirin. 5. Shechem (skm), A bram ’s next stop near Moreh, assuming that it is actually M arawah, w ould have been the present village o f Qisamah (qsm) in the Zahran highlands. 6. Bethel (byt ’I), in the same Zahran highlands, would undoubtedly be the present village o f Butaylah (btyl), which controls one o f the main passes across the escarpment between the inland and coastal parts o f the Zahran region. 7. Ai (h-‘y, w ith the Hebrew definite article) is none other than the present al-‘U y a ’ (exactly ‘y, w ith the Arabic definite article) — a village o f the T aif highlands, to the north-east o f Butaylah, or Bethel, and separated from it by hill country — the ‘m ountain’ (Hebrew hr, also meaning ‘hill country’) between Bethel and Ai. 8. The Negeb (h-ngb, again w ith the Hebrew definite article), in this particular region, must therefore be Jabal Janabah (the ‘m oun­ tain’ o f gnb, w ith the Arabic definite article), north o f Butaylah,

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or Bethel — a densely forested, evergreen ridge, w ith excellent pastures where the cattle o f A bram the Aramean w ould have grazed. Strangely enough the highlands o f the Zahran region o f the southern Hijaz adjacent to these places in the west are called to this day Jabal Ibrahim — the ‘m ountain o f A braham ’. Folk tradition is often correct. In any case, at least from the point o f View of topography, the story o f the migrations o f A bram the Aramean does seem to hold together convincingly in the setting o f the Hijaz. O f course this A bram need not have been a historical character. Like Abram the Hebrew, he could have been the legendary eponymous hero o f an Aramean Abram tribe, as distinct from another, Hebrew A bram tribe. O ther explanations are also possible, as w e shall find out. For the m om ent, however, let us pursue our investigation. T h e A bram o f Genesis 15 O f all the Abrams or Abrahams o f Genesis, the Abram o f Genesis 15 is the most enigmatic. He is no ordinary man as the H ebrew and Aramean Abrams are, but a brooding sacerdotal figure w ho dabbles w ith the occult and enters into a mysterious covenant w ith Yahweh. I strongly suspect that he was none other than the god Baram (brm, sometimes written brn, cf. Biblical ’brm), whose name features in a num ber o f ancient South Arabian inscriptions. W hat does the story say about him? Yahweh, we are told, comes to this Abram in a ‘vision’ (m hzh ), and says to him: ‘Fear not, Abram; I am y our shield; your very great reward!’ Abram answers that he has no use for anything that Yahweh could possibly give him as long as he continues childless, w ithout a son to inherit from him. Actually A bram says m ore than this (15:2-3): M y Lord Yahweh, w hat will you give me, while I go childless, a man o f continence (w-bn msq), m y house being the Dameseq o f Eliezer (byty dmsq ’ly'zr )? Behold, you have given me no seed! behold, the son o f m y house (bn byty) shall inherit me! For readers familiar w ith Biblical Hebrew, w ho may challenge m y translation o f the words attributed to A bram in this passage of

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Genesis, I owe some technical explanation. The Hebrew o f the first verse is highly problematic and has been generally pronounced ‘unclear’. The first part o f the first verse, which presents no problem, reads: ’dny yhwh mh ttn ly w -’ny hwlk ‘ryry (clearly, ‘M y Lord Yahweh, w hat will you give me while I go childless’). In the second part, however, the original Hebrew says: w-bn msq (problematic) byty (clearly ‘m y house’) dmsq ’ly ‘z r (problematic). So far translators of the Bible have taken the first problematic expression, w-bn msq, to mean ‘stew ard’, assuming it to be the subject o f the second sentence in the verse, which w ould make it read: ‘and the steward o f m y house is Dameseq Eliezer’. They generally admit, however, that the rendering o f the H ebrew bn msq as ‘stew ard’ is arbitrary. In Arabic, however, the root msk, which is equivalent to the obscure Hebrew msq, gives the sense o f ‘continence, constipation, abstinence’. A bn msq, hence, w ould be a ‘son o f continence’, idiomatic for a ‘man o f continence’ — a herm it practising sexual abstinence. Having arbitrarily assumed that the expression in question means ‘stew ard’, the translators have hitherto taken the next problematic expression in the verse, Dameseq Eliezer (dmsq ’ly ‘zr), to be the name o f this steward, w ho m they call Eliezer o f Damascus. Actually Biblical scholars have obligingly produced a considerable literature on the identity o f this imagined Eliezer o f Damascus, adopted as a slave in lieu o f a son by the patriarch Abraham when he was still childless. The patriarch, it has been suggested, must have purchased this Eliezer in the Syrian city o f Damascus while on his way from Iraq to Palestine; and there has also been recourse to surviving legal records from ancient M esopotamia (the so-called Nuzi documents) to prove that a slave adopted as a son was entitled, by the traditions o f the times, to inherit his m aster’s property, if the master happened to be childless. However, while the Biblical place name dmsq is indeed identical w ith the historical and present name ofDamascus (Dimashq, or dmsq), the capital o f present-day Syria, Dameseq Eliezer, as a construct, cannot possibly mean ‘Eliezer o f Damascus’. If anything it w ould mean ‘the Damascus o f Eliezer’. Hence the standard translation o f the assumed second part o f the verse in question, ‘and the steward o f m y house is Eliezer o f Damascus’, is untenable on all grounds. O n the other hand, if the Hebrew bn msq is understood to mean ‘man o f continence’, by comparison w ith the Arabic msk which actually means ‘continence’, the original Hebrew o f the verse

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begins to make perfect sense. In this case, w -’ny hwlk ‘ryry w-bn msq, in the first sentence o f the verse, w ould mean ‘while I go childless, a man o f continence’. W hat follows w ould be an explanatory phrase, byty dmsq ’ly'zr, meaning ‘m y house being the Dameseq o f Eliezer’ (a construct o f tw o place names). The question is, w hy was this explanatory phrase throw n in? The only w ay to gain a complete understanding o f w hat the Abram o f Genesis 15 said to Yahweh on this occasion is to assume that this Abram was not merely a celibate hermit, but in fact a virgin god o f sterility and sexual continence w hose principal shrine (byt, ‘house’, in the accepted sense o f ‘tem ple’) was at a place called Dameseq (dmsq, or d-msq, the ‘one o f continence’), near another place called Eliezer (parsed not ’ly ‘zr, but as 7 y'zr, ‘god o f virginity’; cf. Arabic ‘zr, ‘w ithhold’, or ‘dr, the root o f the standard Arabic w ord for ‘virginity’). The nam e A bram itself, as a variant o f brm, may denote this sense. In Arabic a baram (brm) is a ‘miser’, or a ‘man w ho takes no risks’; m ost im portant, he is ‘a man w ho keeps to him self and does not go along w ith others’. W hat better name could there be for a god o f sexual abstinence — an A bram w ho was none other than the ancient South Arabian god Baram? In the story under consideration, this god Abram or Baram blames Yahweh for his condition; Yahweh being frequently described in the H ebrew Bible as a God highly interested in fertility, always com manding his followers to ‘multiply and fill the earth’. The god Abram actually complains to Y ahweh that as long as he remains w ithout ‘seed’ (Hebrew z r 1), whatever he comes to possess will go to the ‘man o f his house’, perhaps meaning the high priest in charge o f his temple at Dameseq, near Eliezer. All this w ould have been mere speculation had it not been that both places still exist by name as neighbouring villages in the hill country o f Rijal Alma* — the rugged parts o f the maritime side o f Asir which slope precipitously dow n to the coast o f the Red Sea south-w est o f the present city o f Abha. There the Biblical Dameseq (d-msq) still survives as the village o f D hat Misk (dt-msk), along w ith the Biblical Eliezer (’I y'zr) which is today the village o f al-‘Adhra (’I ‘dr). Also in the same vicinity lies the village o f Sha‘b al-Baram (the ‘ravine’ o f the God Baram, 7 brm), still carrying the name o f the A bram o f Genesis 15 as a god. In any case Genesis 15 gives no other setting for the story. After these digressions into linguistic and topographical technical-

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ities, we m ust now return to the actual Biblical narrative. In response to A bram ’s complaint about his continued sterility, Yahweh announces to him that he will, in fact, have a son to be his heir instead o f the high priest o f his temple; more than that, he w ould indeed have countless progeny. Abram asks how he can ‘kn o w ’ (’d‘) this — in short, he asks for a cultic ‘sign’ to assure him o f the truth of Y ahw eh’s promise. Yahweh instructs him as to how he may ‘k n o w ’, and A bram follows the instructions, doing the following (15:9-11): he brings a heifer, a she-goat and a ram (all are three years old), and a turtledove and a pigeon. He cuts each animal in two, placing each half o f an animal against the other, but leaves the birds uncut. When the birds o f prey (h-'yt ) come dow n to attack the carcasses, Abram drives them away. Then follows the great mystery (15:12, 15, 17-21): As the sun was going dow n, a deep sleep fell on Abram; and lo, a dread o f great darkness fell upon h im ... [And Yahweh said to him]: ‘You shall go to your fathers in peace; you shall be buried in a good old age...’ W hen the sun had gone dow n and it was dark, behold, a sm oking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between the pieces. O n that day Y ahw eh made a covenant with Abram, saying: ‘T o your descendants I give this land, from the river o f M izraim to the great river, the river Perat — [the land] o f the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites and the Canaanites, the Girgashites and the Jebusites.’ The secret o f the mystery, as I see it, is this: in return for a promise o f ‘seed’ advanced to him by Yahweh, the god Abram, or Barani, weary o f his dismal continence and continued sterility, surrenders his divinity to Yahweh, having been assured o f the veracity o f Yahweh’s promise by a mystic ‘sign’: the smoking fire pot and the flaming torch which miraculously appear before him, apparently to consume the ritual sacrifice he had prepared for Yahweh, according

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to given instructions. A long w ith his divinity, the god A bram also surrenders his immortality; he implicitly agrees to ‘go to his fathers in peace’, and ‘be buried at a good old age’ (15:15). In compensation for his personal im m ortality, he was to be satisfied w ith the im m ortality o f his seed — his countless descendants, w ho were to populate a territory extending all the way from the ‘river o f Mizraim (msrym )’ to the ‘river Perat (prt)\ For a god previously condemned to eternal sexual abstinence and sterility, the bargain was perhaps w orthwhile, especially w hen the territory promised to his descendants was to comprise the full stretch o f the m aritime side of the Asir highlands. In The Bible Came from Arabia, I identified the ‘river o f M izraim ’ and the ‘river Perat’, respectively, as the valleys o f Wadi M asram (msrm), in the extreme south o f geographical Asir, and Wadi Adam, in the extreme north. The latter valley is referred to in the Bible as Perat (prt) after one o f its villages, called Firt or Furat (in both cases prt). There I also identified the names o f all the tribes of peoples mentioned by name in Y ahw eh’s promise to Abram as ancient inhabitants o f that same region and its broader West Arabian vicinity. I suspect that the story told in Genesis 15 is continued in Genesis 17:10-11 (these tw o verses are followed by details which, it seems to me, have been added by a priestly redactor to the essence o f the original). Here, I w ould suggest, the w ording o f Y ahw eh’s ‘covenant’ w ith Abram, as quoted above, continues as follows: This is m y covenant w ith you, which you shall keep between you and me, and you and your descendants after you: every male am ong you shall be circumcised. Y ou shall be circumcised in the flesh o f your foreskins, and it shall be a sign o f the covenant between me and you. U ntil recently, in the same picturesque hill country o f Rijal Alma‘ w here the god A bram or Baram was first robbed o f his divinity and then circumcised, the m ost brutal form o f circumcision used to be performed in public on young men reaching the age o f marriage. Several years ago a ban had to be placed on the practice, which involved not only the rem oval o f the foreskin, but the flaying o f the

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whole skin between the navel and the thighs. Despite the ban it is said that some local tribes still follow the ancient practice in secret. Such, it seems, was the effect o f Y ahw eh’s command not only on the god A bram in his time, but on all later inhabitants o f his home territory. The Greek geographer Strabo, writing about Arabia in the early decades o f the Christian era, noted that the male inhabitants of the parts o f the peninsula recognizable as Asir ‘deprive themselves o f the prepuce’. In any case linguistics remain constant; one w ord tor ‘circumcision’ in Arabic is ‘adhr (‘dr), which is derived from the same root as the Arabic w ord for ‘virginity’ (‘udhrah, also ‘dr). The name o f the village in Rijal A lm a‘ called al-‘Adhra (Abram’s ‘Eliezer’) is formed from the same root. T o overcome his eternal ‘virginity’, it appears that the ancient god o f sexual abstinence and infertility in Rijal A lm a‘ had to surrender not only his divinity and immortality, but also his foreskin. From the semantics o f the root ‘z r and its variant ‘dr, in the two senses o f ‘virginity’ and ‘circumcision’, we gain an interesting insight into the original significance o f circumcision as a rite which prepares a young man for marriage — for the bridegroom, the equivalent o f the breaking o f the bridal hymen. We shall have occasion to elaborate further on this point in due course. The story o f the A bram o f Genesis 15 is next picked up in Genesis 22, or so it appears to me. Here Abram, in the Biblical narrative, is already called Abraham, and the text is heavily edited. Significantly, what is usually taken to be ‘G od’ in this story features in the original H ebrew in tw o forms: Elohim (’Ihym), which means ‘G od’, in reference to the Biblical God Yahweh; and ha-elohim (h-’lhym), with the prefixed definite article, which actually means ‘the gods’ (as in the opening passage from Genesis 6 translated on p. 33). Bearing this in mind the story that actually transpires from the Hebrew o f Genesis 22:1-18 is the following: The ‘gods’ (h-’lhym), apparently amazed at the ease w ith which their colleague A bram or Baram barters his divinity w ith Yahweh in return for fertility, decide to ‘test, try ’ (nsh) Abram, perhaps to find out w hether or not they can persuade him to break his covenant with Yahweh and return to their ranks. Abram, here called Abraham, already has a son, identified in the standing text as Isaac; he is an ‘only son’ (22:2, 12), and A bram naturally ‘loves’ him (22:2). From the preceding episodes o f the Genesis story, we know that Abraham

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already has tw o sons, not one: Ishmael w ho was born to him from Hagar, and Isaac w ho was born to him from Sarah, Ishmael being more than thirteen years older than Isaac (17:25). If the ‘Abraham ’ o f this particular story was the same Abraham, he w ould not have had an ‘only son’, unless this son was Ishmael, before Isaac was born. The story continues: the gods ask A bram to take his ‘only son’ and ‘offer him as a burnt offering’ at a place subsequently identified as the ‘Yahweh o f Y ireh’ (y r’h ), in the land o f M oriah (mryh ). Today Yireh w ould be the village o f Yara’ (y r ’), in Rijal A lm a‘, where M oriah also survives as the village o f M arw ah (mrwh ). Abram, it seems, succumbs to the temptation. H e takes his ‘only son’ to the place indicated, making the boy carry the w ood w ith which his butchered body is to be burnt, while A bram him self carries the fire and the knife (22:6). The boy, w ho is unaware o f the fact that he is to be sacrificed, wonders about the absence o f the sacrificial ‘lam b’. Abram answers, som ew hat wryly: ‘God (’Ihym, not ‘the gods’, or h -’lhym) will provide him self the lamb for the burnt offering, my son’ (22:8). As I see it, A bram here is clearly referring to the God Yahweh, w ho had already provided the ‘lam b’ for his intended burnt offering, by taking away his divinity and giving him instead the son he was now determined to sacrifice. Having reached the appointed place, A bram builds an altar, lays the w ood in order, binds his son, and stretches him over the w ood on the altar. Then, as he takes out the knife to slaughter the boy in preparation for his ritual burning, Y ahweh (mentioned for the first time by name, 22:11) suddenly intervenes to stop him. Yahweh diplomatically pretends to believe that Abram had intended to sacrifice his son to him: ‘D o not lay your hands on the lad,’ he says, ‘or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God (again ’Ihym, not h-’lhym), seeing that you have not withheld your son, your only son, from m e’ (22:12). Abram, caught at his game, yields to Y ahw eh’s command, and Yahweh miraculously provides a ram for the sacrifice, which is now an ordinary animal sacrifice to himself. Abram thereupon gives up the last thought o f breaking his covenant w ith Yahweh and dedicates the place o f the sacrifice to him, calling it Yahweh Yireh (yhwh y r ’h) — the Yahweh o f Yara’ (22:14). The moral: once you have concluded a bargain w ith Yahweh, you cannot easily rescind it, no m atter how sly or determined you may be, for he can always outw it you.

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O f course one can interpret the above story in other ways. What is important, however, is that it appears to be clearly related to the Abram o f Genesis 15, as distinct from A bram the Hebrew or Abram the Aramean, its setting being at Yara’, near Marwah, in the same region o f Rijal Alma* w here the story o f Genesis 15 is set. This provides us w ith the first clue as to how the stories about the different Abrams o f Genesis are confused. A bram the Aramean, as we have .earnt, had made his hom e in the Zahran highlands o f the southern Hijaz, between a Bethel w hich is today Butaylah, and an Ai which :s now al-‘U y a ’. In Rijal A lm a1, there is another Bethel which is known today as the village o f Batllah (btl), and an Ai presently called Ghayy (j>y, cf. Biblical ‘y). All one has to do is place Abram the Aramean between the Bethel and Ai o f Rijal Alma1, instead o f the Bethel and Ai o f the Zahran region, and the story o f the Abram of Genesis 15 and Genesis 16 can be made to apply to him. The identity of the Abram o f Genesis 15, however, is specifically that o f an infertile and childless god. To be identified with him, Abram the Aramean also has to be made initially childless; yet, as the legendary progenitor o f a tribe, he cannot be made personally ‘sterile’ or ‘continent’. Instead he can be provided, fictionally, w ith a ‘barren’ wife. To make this fiction credible it has to be introduced from the start, when A bram the Aramean still lived in his native land o f U r Kasdim. Thus, we are told at the beginning: ‘Abram and N ahor took wives; the nam e o f A bram ’s wife was Sarai... N o w Sarai was barren; she had no child’ (11:29, 30). The A bram o f Beersheba Another A bram in Genesis (also featuring as Abraham) is identified with the childless A bram o f Genesis 15 by fictionally being provided with a barren wife (again called Sarai, or sry, simply meaning ‘lady’). This Abram ‘dwelt in Beersheba’ (22:19), where he had a plantation o f tamarisk trees (21:33). T oday tamarisks are valued for their ability to resist drought and soil salinity. They are planted on sea coasts or in desert areas, where the taller species may be used as windbreaks. In the Near East, however, one species o f tamarisk ( Tamarisk mannifera), when its stems are punctured by a particular parasite (Coccus manniparus), exudes an edible honey-like substance, traditionally relished as one o f the m any forms o f manna. The A bram o f Beersheba, as a cultivator o f tamarisks, was apparently in the manna business.

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In The Bible Came fiom Arabia I identified the Biblical Beersheba (b’r sb\ the ‘well’ o f Sheba, or sb‘) as the village o f Shaba‘ah (sb ‘), in upper Wadi Bishah in inland Asir. Today the village is part of the expanding city o f Khamis Mushait. In the same area I identified one Biblical Gerar (gnj as being present Qararah (qrr); also one of the several places which the Bible calls M izraim (msrym ) as the present village o f Misramah (msrm). Further dow nstream in Wadi Bishah I located a Beer-lahai-roi (b’r Ihy r’y, the ‘well o f the ravine o f r’y ’) as the present oasis o f Ruyah (rwy). According to the Genesis story, this Beer-lahai-roi was the place where the angel o f Yahweh came to the rescue o f A bram ’s pregnant wife Flagar, w ho subsequently bore him his son Ishmael (16:15). It was also one o f the places where A braham ’s son Isaac was supposed to have lived (24:62; 25:11). U pstream from Khamis M ushait lie the highlands o f D hahran alJanub (gnb , Arabic for ‘south’), which I believe to be the N egeb (ngb) o f Abraham o f Beersheba, as distinct from the N egeb o f A bram the Aramean which was the ridge o f Janabah (also gnb), in the Zahran highlands o f the southern Hijaz (see above). Having now tagged Abram o f Beersheba geographically, as we have already done with Abram the Hebrew, A bram the Aramean and the Abram o f Genesis 15, we may proceed to discover w here he, rather than any o f these other Abrams, features in the composite Genesis saga o f Abraham. First we have the story o f A bram ’s sojourn in M izraim (today Misramah), and the affair which his wife Sarai, passing for his sister, had w ith the local Pharaoh — the local potentate, or perhaps the local god (12:10-20). There is m ore to this story than meets the eye (see chapter 5). Second, we have the story o f A bram ’s other wife H agar (16:1-15), whose setting appears to have been Wadi Bishah, considering that her Beer-lahai-roi (see above) is still there. This story leads us to assume that the A bram w ho was the father o f Ishmael was Abram o f Beersheba; also that this Ishmael, rather than Isaac, was the son o f ‘A braham ’ w ho lived in Beer-lahai-roi (24:62; 25:11), considering that it was not Isaac’s m other Sarah (originally Sarai), but Ishmael’s m other Hagar w ho fled there when she was pregnant w ith him. Third, we have the story o f A braham ’s sojourn in Gerar (today Qararah), where his wife (now called Sarah), again passing for his sister, had an affair this tim e w ith the ‘king o f Gerar’ (20:1-18). Here again w e have A bram o f Beersheba, not ‘A braham ’.

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Fourth, we have the story o f A braham ’s repudiation o f Hagar, who takes her son Ishmael and wanders off with him into the ‘wilderness o f Beersheba’ (21:9-20). A t the end o f this story, we are told that Ishmael, w hen he grew to m anhood, lived in the wilderness of Paran (p ’rn) — probably the Faran (pm) which is the present ridge and oasis o f the Zahran highlands at Wadi Ranyah, north o f Wadi Bishah, rather than the Al Farwan (7 prwn) o f the highlands south of Khamis M ushait, which features elsewhere in the Genesis story of A braham as El Paran (7 p ’rn, 14:6). Fifth, we have the story o f h o w Abraham (again Abram of Beersheba) persuades the ‘king o f G erar’ to recognize his possession of the well he had dug at Beersheba, then proceeds to plant his tamarisks (21:22-33). Sixth, and last, it is possible that A bram o f Beersheba was the 'Abraham ’ w ho took another wife by the name o f Keturah (25:1-6), considering that this K eturah’s sons and their descendants reportedly lived in the same ‘east country’ as Ishmael (25:6). H ow did the redactors o f Genesis manage to identify the Abraham who was actually A bram o f Beersheba w ith the three other Abrams whose identities we have already established? The answer is simple: 1. To identify the prolific A bram o f Beersheba with the initially childless A bram o f Genesis 15, he was provided, fictionally, w ith a first wife w ho ‘bore him no children’ (16:1). 2. T o identify him w ith Abram the Aramean, the report o f his journey from M izraim to the Negeb (13:1), i.e. from the present Misramah to the present Dhahran al-Janub in southern Asir, was combined w ith the report o f the journey o f Abram the Aramean from the N egeb towards Bethel (13:3), i.e. from the present Janabah to the present Butaylah in the southern Hijaz, w ithout indicating that the first Negeb was one place and the second Negeb another, about 350 kilometres away. 3. To identify him, finally, w ith A bram the Hebrew, all one had to do was to make him ‘com e’ (yb’) from Beersheba (22:19) to bury the wife o f A bram the H ebrew in H ebron, which was the latter A bram ’s home. The deft interpolation o f the verb ‘com e’ here did the trick, enabling the A bram o f Beersheba to take full charge of the burial o f another m an’s wife.

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A bram o f the Y em en Apart from the mythical Abram o f Genesis 15, w ho was apparently a god, which o f the remaining three Abrams was the descendant of Eber and Shem introduced in Genesis 11:27? Perhaps none. Abram the Eberite (if we may call him so) was definitely a tribe or folk. Projecting his name and the names o f his ancestors against the map o f Arabia, one finds that the Eberite Abrams m ust have been an ancient com m unity o f the Yemen. In the southern highlands o f the Yemen, as we have noted in the preceding chapter, the name o f Shem (sm ), allegedly the son o f Noah, and the ancestor o f ‘all the Eber people’ (Genesis 10:21), survives in the village o f Shumm (exactly sm). It has also been observed that the same Shem features in the recorded lore o f the Y emen as a national hero w ho was the founder o f the city o f Sanaa, the capital o f m odern N orth Yemen. The following are the names o f Shem’s descendants dow n to Abram, as they are listed in Genesis 11:10-26: 1. Shem’s ‘son’ was Arpachshad (’rpksd, or ’rp ksd). His name appears to combine the name o f the historical Yemenite tribe called the Yarfa (yrp) w ith that o f the village o f Kasad (ksd), in the northern Yemen highlands. This w ould make the name Arpachshad, linguistically, a construct meaning ‘the Yarfa o f Kasad’. 2. Arpachshad’s ‘son’ was Shelah (slh). His name is clearly that o f the historical Yemenite tribe o f the Salih (slh), w ho ultimately migrated to Syria in the early centuries o f the Christian era. 3. Shelah’s ‘son’ was Eber (‘br). His nam e is still carried by ‘Ubrah (''br), a village o f the southern Yemen highlands not far from Shumm, or ‘Shem’. 4. Eber’s ‘son’ was Peleg (pig), today the nam e o f the valley of WadiFalaqah (plq), in the inland J a w f region o f the northern Yemen. 5. Peleg’s ‘son’ was Reu (r‘w), remembered in the name o f the historical Yemenite tribe o f Ra‘a (r‘), once the inhabitants o f the present village o f ‘Aru (‘rw), in the same Jaw f region. 6. R eu’s ‘son’ was Serug (srwg). This is probably in the name of the historically attested northern Yemenite village o f Shawariq (swrq). 7. Serug’s ‘son’ was N ahor (nhwr). The name, today, is probably that o f the village o f H aw ran (hwrn, metathesis o f nhwr), near Shumm (Biblical ‘Shem’) and ‘U brah (Biblical ‘E ber’), in the southern Yemen highlands.

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8. N ahor’s ‘son’ was Terah (trh). The historically attested Yemenite village o f Takhir (thr) carries a metathesis o f this name. 9. Terah’s ‘son’ was A bram (’brm), this one, the A bram o f the Yemen. The name o f this A bram still stands immortalized near Shumm (‘Shem’), ‘U brah (‘Eber’) and Hawran (‘N ahor’), in the southern Yemen highlands, as the village o f Burm (brm). In Genesis 11, Terah, ‘father’ o f the Abram o f the Yemen, was transformed into the ‘father’ o f Abram the Aramean, and hence of the other Abrams o f the Genesis story, by interpolating him into one verse: ‘Terah took Abram, his son... from U r Kasdim to go into the land o f Canaan’ (11:31). As I see it, Terah and his ‘son’ Abram o f the Yemen are figures o f an entirely different lore, deriving from a different place. Why so m any Abrams? All five o f these Abrams — the Hebrew, the Aramean, the one of Genesis 15, the men o f Beersheba and the Yemen — could not have been ‘Abrahams’, because they were know n by an altogether different name. The question o f Abraham him self deserves to be discussed in a separate chapter. Here, however, one must ask: w hy are the stories o f five different Abrams combined and narrated as one story in Genesis? The answer is anyone’s guess, m y own being the following: The ancient Israelites, like most historical peoples, did not come from one stock. They were a confederation o f different West Arabian tribes, traditionally reckoned to be twelve, some o f w hom were originally ‘H ebrew ’ (e.g. D euteronom y 15:12), while others were ‘Aramean’ (Deuteronomy 26:5). As these tribes developed into a historical nation, the cult o f Yahweh, originally one o f a countless num ber o f Arabian folk cults, was developed among them into a monotheism which came to have m any non-Israelite Arabian adherents, most notably am ong the tribes o f the Wadi Bishah basin, and in the Yemen. The ‘H ebrew ’ Israelite tribes, w ho were established from an early time in the coastal hill country o f the southern Hijaz and Asir, used to claim descent from a com m on ancestor whose home was in Hebron, today the village o f Khirban, in the Qunfudhah hinterland. To them, this ancestor was an ‘exalted father’, who in Hebrew as in Aramaic w ould be an ab ram (’b for ‘father’; rm for ‘exalted’). In

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legend this ‘exalted father’ was given his title as a personal name, Abram. The Aramean Israelite tribes also claimed for themselves an ‘exalted father’, or ab ram, whose original title was transformed by legend into the personal name A bram. The original hom e o f this Aramean Abram was believed to be a place called U r which is today Jabal A wr, south o f Medina in the central Hijaz. A m ong the protoIsraelites o f the Wadi Bishah basin there was a rich lore about another local ‘exalted father’ — the ab ram, or Abram o f Beersheba, today Shaba‘ah, in the vicinity o f Khamis Mushait. In the southern Yemen there existed a tribe actually know n as the Abram, w hose name survives as that o f the local village o f Burm, along w ith the names o f other related tribes. Am ong the latter-day Israelites, all these different strains o f tribal lore, being equally relevant to Israelite and Jewish Arabian society, were naturally fused into one. As this fusion o f the lore was set in motion, it also absorbed the m ythology o f an attested South Arabian god called Burm — a god o f celibacy and sexual chastity, whose cult involved ritual circumcision for young men reaching the age of marriage. Perhaps the m ythology o f this god A bram was fused with the composite folk legend o f the com m on Israelite A bram because male circumcision, which may have been originally his special rite, was adopted by the Israelites and ultimately enjoined and standardized as regular and universal Jewish practice. This is mere conjecture, but it may be useful for the time being to keep it in m ind as we turn to consider other matters which may put its possible validity to the test.

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In m any passages o f the Genesis story, as we have seen, Abraham is really ‘A bram ’ under a different name: Abram the Hebrew, Abram the Aramean, A bram o f Beersheba, Abram o f the Yemen, or the Abram o f Genesis 15. In other passages, however, Abraham is an altogether different person: like the Abram o f Genesis 15, he is a figure o f religious m ythology rather than tribal legend — more a god in a w orld o f gods than a man in a w orld o f men. In the nineteenth century this was the wild guess o f a num ber o f eminent Biblical scholars, but it has since been abandoned in favour o f more ‘scientific’ assessments on the historicity or non-historicity o f Abraham. For the sake o f argument let us assume that he was actually a god and examine the Genesis material about him accordingly. Perhaps the evidence we shall discover will restore some respectability to an old view which has long been condemned by modern ‘Bible Science’. The rain g od A bu R uh m Much has been w ritten about the etymology o f the name ‘A braham ’, yet it has remained a puzzle. In Genesis 17:5, ‘A braham ’ (’brhm, parsed ’b rhm) is taken to mean ‘father o f a m ultitude’. Certainly, the com m on Semitic ’b does mean ‘father’, as in ’b rm, or ‘exalted father’ — the name o f ‘A bram ’ (see preceding chapter). In Hebrew, rhm is not know n to mean ‘multitude’, but in Arabic the same word, vocalized as ruham, can mean ‘great num ber’. With the same vocalization, the w ord in Arabic also means ‘non-raptorial birds’,

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i.e. those which are not birds o f prey. Genesis 15 could have been preparing for the change o f the name ‘A bram ’ to ‘A braham ’ by suggesting the name in this second sense, where one verse (15:11) explained somewhat fortuitously: ‘W hen the birds o f prey came down on the carcasses, A bram drove them away’ (see preceding chapter). The subtle hint offered here could have been that A bram came to deserve the change o f his name to ‘A braham ’ (’b rhm, meaning ‘father o f the non-raptorial birds’), because he prevented birds o f prey attacking the carcasses he had prepared for his m ystery rite, which included tw o birds o f particularly harmless breed: ‘a turtledove and a young pigeon’ (15:9). However, there is another sense to the Arabic rhm. W hen vocalized as riham or ruhm, it is best attested to mean ‘rain’ — not destructive torrential rain, but the ‘gentle drizzle’ which makes the soil arable and causes crops to grow . Arabic dictionaries give this sense to the term for the personal nam e Abu R uhm (’b rhm, exactly as in the Biblical ’brhm, for ‘A braham ’). In Arabia this name was extremely com m on until the coming o f Islam, when it suddenly vanished from existence. Literally it m e a n s‘father o f rain’, or t h e ‘one o f rain’, which in idiomatic Arabic can mean ‘generous, hospitable, m agnanim ous’. M ore likely, however, the original Abu R uhm (or ‘A braham ’) was an ancient Arabian god o f rain, and hence o f dry-farming. In Genesis 17 it is not Yahweh but ‘G od’, under the nam e o f El Shaddai (7 sdy, traditionally rendered ‘God A lm ighty’), w ho changes the name o f Abram to ‘A braham ’, or Abu Ruhm , thus transforming the sexually continent god o f infertility o f Genesis 15 into a god of rain, the prim e giver o f fertility. El Shaddai had good reason to do this. Judging by his nam e (Akkadian shadu, or sdw, ‘m ountain’; Arabic sawd, or swd, ‘rocky mountainside’), he was the god o f a ‘m ountain’, keenly interested in securing rain to make his terraced slopes amenable to dry-farming. In West Arabia the nam e o f the mountain god El Shaddai (7 sdy) survives as Al Sadi (7 sdy) — the nam e o f a village in the rugged highlands o f D hahran al-Janub, which was the ‘N egeb’ o f A bram o f Beersheba (see preceding chapter). In one way or another, the topography o f West Arabia seems to fit the Genesis saga o f Abraham at every level. A m arriage o f con ven ien ce In Genesis, Abram, the ancestor or ‘exalted father’ (’b rm) o f different

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groups o f Israelites, is the husband o f Sarai (sry), whose name means simply ‘lady’. In idiomatic Arabic ia d y ’ is the standard way to refer to a ‘grandm other’, or ‘ancestress’. Thus, so to speak, Abram, personifying the ‘ancestor’, was married to Sarai, personifying the ‘ancestress’. With A braham as the rain god Abu Ruhm it was a different matter; his wife was not Sarai, but Sarah. In Hebrew, Sarah (.srh, in constructs srt) can also mean ‘lady’. In Arabic, however, it is a collective noun m eaning ‘highlands’. In West Arabia, the Sarah or Sarat, identical w ith the biblical ‘Sarah’, is the name by which the highlands o f the southern Hijaz, Asir and the Yemen have traditionally been know n. Thus, allegorically, when Abram the god o f infertility, at the bidding o f the m ountain god El Shaddai, agreed to become the prime agent o f fertility as the rain god Abu Ruhm, or ‘A braham ’, he automatically became the ‘husband’, and hence the fertilizer, o f the West Arabian highlands called until today the Sarah. Even more likely, he became the husband o f the goddess o f these highlands, Al Sarah (7 srh), whose name survives intact there as that o f a village in the Asir highlands which flank Wadi Bishah from the west. Allegorically, Al Sarah (Biblical ‘Sarah’) was ‘barren’ and ‘had no child’ until Abu R uhm (Biblical ‘A braham ’) came forth to become her husband. Here, truly, was a marriage o f convenience between a god o f ‘rain’ and a goddess o f the parched ‘highlands’. Such is the trust and intimacy that develop between ‘Abraham ’ as the rain god Abu Ruhm, and ‘Sarah’ as the highland goddess Al Sarah, that they can afford som e dangerous pranks. In Mizraim (today Misramah), in Wadi Bishah, Pharaoh (pr‘h) was apparently a local god o f ‘running streams’. A t least, this is one sense that p r ‘h {asfar', or p r ‘) has in Arabic. Al Fari‘ (’I p r ‘, the ‘god’ pr°) and Al Fira‘ah (’Ip r ‘h, the ‘god’ p r‘h ) still exist as place names in the Asir highlands — the first in Dhahran al-Janub, a short distance south o f Misramah. This attests to the ancient worship o f a god o f ‘running streams’ in the region. When, according to Genesis, A braham and Sarah go to Mizraim, Abraham surmises that Pharaoh w ould have an eye for his beautiful wife and instructs her to pretend that she is his sister. So Sarah goes to stay in Pharaoh’s ‘house’ (b y tp r‘h , 12:15) — I w ould say, the god Al Fira'ah’s ‘tem ple’ (also byt). In this story Abraham is identified w ith the Abram o f Beersheba, and Sarah features as this A bram ’s wife Sarai. The same story, however, is repeated in Genesis about Abraham and Sarah and the king o f Gerar (20:2-18) which is today the village o f Qararah, in

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Wadi Bishah; it is also retold about A braham ’s son Isaac and his beautiful wife Rebekkah w hen they went, in their turn, to stay in the same Gerar (26:7-11). Rather than try to fathom the allegorical significance o f this thrice-repeated story, I shall limit m yself to recounting what the British explorer H. St.J.B. Philby experienced in the 1930s when he visited Wadi Bishah and its neighbourhood, where the Biblical Mizraim and Gerar are located (Arabian Highlands, Ithaca, N .Y ., 1952, p. 188): I espied a girl guiding a flock o f goats in our direction, and [my guide] H alaf suggested that a draught o f milk w ould be refreshing. I agreed, whereupon he raised his voice and shouted: Ya ra'iyat al ghanam — ‘O h, Shepherdess!’ T he girl came towards us and halted a little way off to milk one o f her goats into a w ooden bowl, which she brought to us w ith a confident smile — a nice-looking girl in picturesque rags which outlined the perfect lines o f a young, wellmade body w ith firm breasts and rounded haunches... I naturally wanted to know m ore about her... ‘She is m y sister,’ explained Halaf, ‘and not yet m arried.’ The girl giggled in confirmation... Halaf, who was to accompany me on our next stage, made an excuse that he had certain instructions to give his sister, and I w ent... alone. By the time I got back to camp he had not come in, but his father was there... ‘W hat have you done w ith m y son?’ he asked quizzically. ‘I left him up there,’ I replied, ‘w ith his sister and her goats.’ ‘His sister!’ he replied w ith a chuckle. ‘Did he say she was his sister now? Why! She is his w ife.’ It seemed almost like an echo from the days o f Abraham! Is it conceivable that a piece o f ancient West Arabian m ythology about a god and his consort should have survived as a standard joke in the exact land o f its origin? T he birth o f the g o d o f w ells The product o f the marriage o f Abraham and Sarah was Isaac — a som ew hat shadowy figure w ho only comes to life twice in the Genesis narrative: first, as he goes out to meet his cousin Rebekkah, w hen she is brought to him as a bride from A ram-naharaim (24:62-67) (see p. 80); second, in blindness and old age, w hen he confuses the identities o f his tw in sons Esau and Jacob, and unknow ingly grants

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the second the birthright o f the first (2-7:1-40). In the first instance, Isaac is clearly the ‘son’ o f Abram the Aramean, and the bride w ho is brought to him is allegedly the granddaughter o f his Aramean uncle Nahor. T he place w here he meets her and brings her ‘into his tent’ is the ‘N egeb’ — in this case, the Janabah o f the Zahran highlands in the southern Hijaz, in w hose rich pastures Abram the A ramean’s cattle used to graze. T he identity o f the place is beyond doubt. The topography provides the following evidence. In translations, Genesis 24:63 says that Isaac ‘w ent o u t’ from the Negeb ‘to meditate (l-swh ) in the field (b-sdh) in the evening (l-pnwt ‘rby, then he lifted up his eyes to see Rebekkah arrive (RSV). W hat the original H ebrew actually means is that Isaac ‘w ent out’ from janabah, ‘to Suah (l-swh), in Sadeh (b-sdh) to the corners (environs, towers?) o f ‘Areb (l-pnwt ‘rby, and it was there that he first set eyes on his bride. All three places — Suah, Sadeh and ‘Areb — are still found by name in the Zahran highlands, downhill from the ridge ofjabal Janabah, or the ‘N egeb’, tow ards the Red Sea coast. There ‘Suah, in Sadeh’ is today the village o f Al Sahah (sh, on one of the tw in ridges ofjabal Shada (sd’). Facing Al Sahah to the north, on the other Shada ridge, is the village o f ‘A rba’ ( ‘rb’). The Isaac (yshq, noun derivative from the verb shq) w ho was A bram the Aramean’s ‘son’ had to go downhill from Jabal Janabah to meet his bride, w ho was being brought to him from N aharln (Biblical ‘N aharaim ’), in the Taif region, by way o f the coastal road (see map p. 128). His ow n name survives in the same Zahran highlands as that o f the mountain pass called ‘Aqabat Mazhak (mzhk, noun derivative from zhk, cf. the Biblical H ebrew shq), which crosses the rocky escarpment from the vicinity o f Jabal Janabah to reach the coastlands o f the Red Sea. So the Isaac w h o lived in the ‘N egeb’, today Janabah, was the ‘son’ of A bram the Aramean, regardless o f whether or not the bride who was brought to him was actually called Rebekkah. To identify him with the other Isaac w ho was the son o f ‘Abraham ’ and ‘Sarah’, Genesis had to explain ho w this other Isaac came to be living in Jabal Janabah in the Zahran highlands at the time o f his marriage, since his home m ust have been n o t there, but in Wadi Bishah, where the story of his parents ‘A braham ’ and ‘Sarah’ is set. The explanation given is somewhat clumsy: ‘N o w , Isaac had come from Beer-lahai-roi (i.e. the oasis o f Ruyah, in Wadi Bishah, see p. 90), and was dwelling in the Negeb (i.e. Janabah, in the Zahran highlands)’ (24:62).

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The second instance w hen Isaac comes to life in the Genesis story is when he appears to be the son o f Abram the H ebrew o f Hebron. This Isaac was the father o f Esau and Jacob w ho are subsequently called Edom and Israel (another confusion o f identities, as we shall see). Like his father A bram the Hebrew, the ‘Isaac’ w ho was the father o f Edom and Israel, regardless o f his actual name, must also have lived in Hebron (stated only in Genesis 35:27). His son Israel reportedly lived in the ‘valley o f H ebron’ (37:14), in the ‘land o f Canaan’ (37:1), and was finally buried in the nearby cave o f Machpelah (49:30; 50:13), where his alleged grandfather A bram the H ebrew had been buried. It is significant that Genesis apparently makes a point o f not specifying where the Isaac w ho was Israel’s father was buried. He simply ‘died at a ripe old age, and his sons Esau and Jacob buried him ’ (35:29). N o mention is made o f the cave o f Machpelah as his place o f burial. I suspect that there was no Isaac o f Hebron w ho was the ‘son’ o f Abram the Hebrew in the original lore from which the Genesis story of A braham was composed. If we accept that there was a H ebrew Isaac w ho lived in Hebron, to disentangle his character and that o f the Aramean Isaac from the character o f the Isaac w ho was the son o f ‘A braham ’ and ‘Sarah’, in the confusion o f the Genesis story, would make tedious reading. Therefore, I propose to concentrate instead on the m ost interesting o f the three — the shadowy and elusive Isaac w ho was b o m to the rain god Abu Ruhm, or ‘A braham ’, by his consort Al Sarah, or ‘Sarah’, the goddess o f the Asir highlands. To begin with, we m ust examine Isaac’s name, yshq, which in Genesis is taken to mean ‘laughter’ (substantive o f shq, ‘laugh’; Arabic dhk, also ‘laugh’; see Genesis 18:12-15; 21:3, 6). In Arabic, however, this w ord for ‘laugh’ also means ‘overflow ’ (said o f the water in a well). Laughter is figuratively an ‘overflow ’ o f cognizant emotion. Actually, the Arabic dictionaries give ‘overflow ’ as the original meaning o f dhk (Hebrew shq), from which the sense o f ‘laugh’ is derived. Thus the Arabic personal name Dahhak, which is the equivalent o f the H ebrew yshk, or ‘Isaac’, w ould have originally meant the ‘overflowing one’ — figuratively, a reference to generosity, or abundance o f means, but literally, an ‘overflowing w ell’. Where he is the son o f Abu Ruhm, the god o f rain, and Al Sarah, the goddess o f the highlands, I w ould venture to guess that Isaac was a well, or rather god o f wells. Consider the following:

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1. In the same chapter (Genesis 21) where the birth o f Isaac is reported, we are told that it was A braham w ho first dug the ‘well’ of Beersheba (21:30). 2. A braham is actually credited w ith digging a number o f wells in different places, all o f which were subsequently stopped and filled with earth (26:15). 3. Isaac, it is said, ‘dug again the wells o f water which had been dug in the days o f A braham his father’ (26:18). Four such wells are mentioned by nam e (26:19-23, 32-33), one o f them being the well of Beersheba (b’r sb1), which Isaac reportedly called Shibah (sb‘h, or ‘abundance’) — today Shaba'ah (sb‘h ), in upper Wadi Bishah, near Khamis Mushait. 4. Isaac, it is said, ‘lived’ in Beer-lahai-roi (b’r Ihy r’y) and in Beersheba (26:33; 28:10). Both places were ‘wells’ (singular b’r). As a god o f wells w ho actually ‘lived’ in wells, Isaac, the ‘overflowing one’, m ust have been one o f three deities associated with a cult o f fertility in ancient Wadi Bishah, the other tw o being his ‘father’, a god o f rain, and his ‘m other’, a goddess o f the highlands. In Wadi Bishah cultivation still depends partly on rain (Abraham), partly on wells (Isaac) — not to m ention the local ‘running streams’ (Pharaoh). Here is h o w Philby describes the agriculture o f upper Wadi Bishah, near Khamis Mushait, w here the Genesis story of Abraham, Sarah and Isaac is set (Arabian Highlands, p. 132): The main industry in the area was the growing o f cereal crops, chiefly w heat... and millet... and lucerne. The cornfields... covered a vast area on both sides o f the Bisha channel and its local tributaries — being partly irrigated by the floods and partly from wells, which are for the m ost part w ide-m outhed (in some cases tw enty feet across) w ith a loose steening o f stones to keep out the silt from the shaft, which after a few feet pierces the underlying granite to reach w ater at only three fathoms from the surface. For a god o f fertility, such as a god o f wells, the natural ‘sign’ w ould have been his male prowess — his ‘thigh’ (Hebrew phd, Arabic fakhdh, also phd), which, certainly in Arabic, is a standard euphemism for the phallus. In Genesis 31:42, Jacob, as the son o f Isaac (see below), identifies the ‘god o f his father’ as being the ‘thigh

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o f Isaac’ (phd yshq), meaning the ‘phallus o f Isaac’. In 31:53, it is by the same ‘thigh’ or phallus o f his ‘father Isaac’ that he swears. In some m odern translations this phd yshq is rendered as the ‘fear o f Isaac’ (from the H ebrew phd in the sense o f ‘trem ble’), but this makes poor sense and is plainly incorrect. El R oi and Ishm ael There is hardly a doubt that the Biblical Beer-lahai-roi (the ‘well o f the ravine o f r’y ’) is actually the oasis o f Ruyah (rwy) in low er Wadi Bishah. In Hebrew, a r’y is a ‘seer’ or ‘one o f vision’, from the verb r’h (Arabic r’y), ‘see’. In Arabic the w ord riiyah is a widely attested, dialectal pronunciation o f ru’yah (r’yh ), meaning ‘vision’. According to Genesis, Beer-lahai-roi ‘lies between Kadesh (qds) and Bered (brd)’ (16:14) — today Jadas (gds) and Baridah (brd), tw o other oases in the same area. It is also said to lie ‘on the way to Shur (swr)' (16:7) — apparently present Banl Sar (sr), on the inland side o f the Zahran highlands to the west. Apart from being mentioned in Genesis as one o f the places in which Isaac dwelt, Beer-lahai-roi also features in the story o f Hagar — the w om an by w hom A bram (I would say Abram o f Beersheba) begot his son Ishmael (see preceding chapter). According to this story, it was the childless Sarai w ho instructed her husband Abram to have children by her maid Hagar, w ho is described as a MTsrTt (msryt, 16:3), traditionally taken to mean an ‘Egyptian’. Actually, Misr (msr) still exists as a village in the Wadi Bishah basin; as a Misrit, or ‘w om an o f M isr’, H agar w ould have come from there. When Hagar became pregnant, so the story continues, she looked on her mistress w ith contempt; thereupon Sarai, w ith A bram ’s permission, proceeded to deal harshly w ith her, forcing her to flee into the wilderness. The angel o f Yahweh (16:9-10), or Yahweh him self (16:13), found her by a water spring and told her that she would have a son w hom she should call Ishmael. Hagar, however, did not recognize the god w ho spoke to her as being Yahweh, so she called him El Roi (’I r’y), the ‘god o f seeing’ (16:13); hence the name o f the spring w here he found her, which was none other than Beer-lahai-roi, or the ‘well o f the ravine o f R oi’. The Biblical form o f the name Ishmael, which the god El Roi chose for her yet unborn son, is ysm ‘1, shortened form o f ysm ‘ 7 — ‘god hears’ or the ‘hearing o f god’. This was actually the nam e o f an ancient West Arabian ‘god

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of hearing’ w hose name survives in the villages of Al Sham‘ah (7 sm‘) in the T aif region o f the Hijaz, and also in the village o f Al SamT'ah (7 sm1) in Asir. There is, furthermore, a village called Al Isma‘Il (literally, ‘the god Ishmael’) in the vicinity o f Abha, which I visited. H ow did this lore about El Roi, the god o f seeing, and Ishmael, the god o f hearing, become fused w ith the legend o f Abram of Beersheba, and ultimately with the m yth o f Abraham or Abu Ruhm? In the highlands o f D hahran al-Janub (the ‘Negeb’ o f Abram o f Beersheba), there still exists a village called Bani Hajar (hgr), whose name literally means the ‘Hagar folk’. A t one time a tribe called the Hagar must have lived there, claiming descent from a Hagar who was allegedly the wife o f Abram o f Beersheba and who came originally from M isr in lower Wadi Bishah. Today, as a result of some ancient migration, the Hagar (or Banu Hajar) are to be found as a tribe o f considerable size in the vicinity o f another Dhahran — today’s oil capital o f East Arabia. A m o ng the many branches of these m odern Banu Hajar are the M asarir (msryr), or ‘Misr (msr) folk’, still know n by the name o f H agar’s alleged place o f origin in lower Wadi Bishah. A nother is that o f the Shaba'In (those o f Shaba‘ah, the Biblical Beersheba), still know n by the name o f the territory o f their alleged ancestor A bram o f Beersheba. Yet another branch, and an im portant one, is that o f the Shama‘Tl (sm‘l), whose name is so obviously a corruption o f the ‘Ishmael’ o f the Bible. Apparently, one branch o f the Hagar folk were originally called the Ishmael, possibly because o f a special devotion to the ‘god o f hearing’, or because they claimed an ancestor called after this god. Other Hagar folk, how ever, m ust have paid special veneration to El Roi, the ‘god o f seeing’, w hose main shrine was at Ruyah, the Biblical Beer-lahai-roi, in lower Wadi Bishah; hence the Biblical association o f the story o f H agar w ith the place. As Wadi Bishah was the setting for the m ythology o f the rain god (Abraham) and the god o f wells (Isaac) on the one hand, and that o f the god o f seeing (El Roi) and the god o f hearing (Ishmael) on the other, it was only natural that the tw o mythologies became fused. But let us return to the story o f Isaac and his progeny. Esau and Jacob As the ‘son’ o f A bram the Hebrew, Isaac (assuming this to be his actual name) was the ‘father’, or claimed com m on ancestor, o f two

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peoples: the Hebrew Israelites (Israel) and the Edomites (Edom). As the god o f wells and the product o f the marriage between Abraham, the god o f rain, and Sarah, the goddess o f the Asir highlands, he was the father o f tw o far m ore interesting figures: the tw in brothers Esau and Jacob. First, Esau was born out o f his m oth er’s w omb, then Jacob followed, his hand clutching at his brother’s heel (25:2526). The tw o were twins in more than one sense. Born to a god o f wells, by whose ‘thigh’ or phallus people swore, they were twin gods o f male prowess: the first, a god o f unbridled male sexuality; the second, o f domestic connubiality and concern for progeny. Being himself a god o f masculinity, Isaac preferred Esau to Jacob. His wife Rebekkah, however, naturally preferred Jacob to Esau. To begin with, let us consider the names and characters o f the twin brothers, as described in Genesis. Esau’s name (‘sw), in Hebrew, means ‘hairy’; on the other hand, judging by the surviving meaning o f ‘s (vocalized ‘is) in Arabic, it is more likely to have meant ‘semen’, for this is what the Arabic w ord actually means. Esau himself was the stereotype o f nonchalant masculinity: a skilful hunter and a man o f the outdoors (25:27) w ho ‘despised his birthright’ (25:34). Jacob’s name (y ‘qb), o f which the Arabic equivalent is ‘U qbah (' qb), comes from the verb ‘qb (Hebrew and Arabic, ‘follow behind, succeed’), o f which the transitive Arabic form a'qaba (“ qb) means ‘to have progeny’. As the archaic substantive o f this verb, y ‘qb, or ‘J acob’, w ould mean ‘succession, progeny’. Unlike the reckless Esau, Jacob was a ‘correct m an’ (’ys tm), a ‘dweller in tents’ (25:27). Setting high value on domestic prestige, he persuades his careless brother Esau to sell him his right o f the firstborn for a meal o f bread and boiled lentils (25:29-34), then tricks his father, Isaac, into confirming this arrangement, with the help ofhis wily m other Rebekkah (27:1-29). There remains one unanswered question: was Rebekkah the wife o f the Isaac w ho was the son o f Abram the Aramean, or was she the consort o f Isaac the god o f wells? She could have been both, but she was certainly the second. H er name (Biblical rbqli), if read as the Arabic rabighah (rbgh), w ould mean ‘fecund’, which w ould make her personalize fecundity. If read as the Arabic rabiqah (rbqh), it would mean ‘wily’. As a goddess personifying fecundity, Rebekkah would have been eminently suitable as a consort for the god o f wells. As the personification o f female guile, her role in the story o f Esau and Jacob is clear: she taught the god o f progeny and regular domestic

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life the stratagem by which he could triumph over the god o f unbridled male sexuality and rob him o f his ‘right o f the firstborn’. Genesis fully approves o f the wiles o f Rebekkah, and for a very good reason: w ithout her manipulative talents, untamed masculinity would have succeeded to its birthright and made regular family life impossible; and w ithout the institution o f the family, where wrould civilization be? The name o f Isaac as a god perhaps survives topographically in West Arabia in a corrupted form in the village o f Al Husaykah (7 hsyk), in the Asir highlands west o f Wadi Bishah. The name o f his consort Rebekkah — as Rabigh (rbg), Rabqah (rbqh), and also in other recognizable forms — survives as a place name in various West Arabian regions, one o f them being Al Gharibah (’Igrbh, the ‘goddess’ grbh, metathesis o f rbqh), in lower Wadi Bishah, close to the oasis of Ruyah (Beer-lahai-roi). The name o f Jacob as a god certainly survives there as the place name Al ‘U qbah (7 (qb). As for the name o f Esau as a god, it is carried to this day by no less than seven villages called Al ‘Isa (7 's , ‘god o f the semen’) in all parts o f the Hijaz and Asir except Wadi Bishah. Rebekkah, we may suppose, succeeded in suppressing the cult o f her sexually irresponsible son Esau in Wadi Bishah, in favour o f the m ore domesticated cult o f her son Jacob. Elsewhere in ancient West Arabia, however, the cult o f Esau, judging by the topographical statistics, remained the more popular one. Nevertheless, Jacob, as the god o f domesticated masculinity, was no less potent than his w anton ‘brother’ Esau. The fact that Esau was a flamboyant, ‘hairy m an’, w hilejacob was a quietly sly ‘smooth man’ (27:11) did not make a great difference. In the cult o f Jacob, his ‘m ighty one’ (’byr), no different from the ‘thigh’ (pkd) o f his ‘father’ Isaac, was credited w ith special significance (49:24). And for good reason; after all, the ultimate proof o f genuine masculinity does not lie in outw ard and irresponsible demonstrations o f male prowess, but in the regular siring o f progeny. Yet Esau, though defeated by his domesticated ‘brother’ Jacob, always remains ready to reassert his presence on the mythological scene at the first opportunity, with secret approval from his doting ‘father’ Isaac. According to the Genesis story, the smooth Jacob, wearing a kid’s skin, approaches his blind father Isaac and deceives him into believing that he is the hairy Esau, and so secures from him the blessing reserved for the firstborn. Isaac, deceived, actually

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blesses Jacob instead o f Esau. When Esau returns hom e to ask his father for the blessing that was his ow n birthright, Isaac can no longer give it, as it is already bestowed on Jacob. Yet Isaac does have a w ord o f consolation left for the son he still secretly prefers (27:3940): Behold, away from the fatness o f the earth shall your dwelling be, and away from the dew o f heaven on high. By your sword you shall live, and you shall serve your brother; but when you break loose, you shall break his yoke from your neckl

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6 Joseph and his E gypt

In the rugged highlands o f Rijal A lm a1, south-west o f Abha, the capital o f the m odern Saudi Arabian province o f Asir, stands a tiny village called K hatm Tawi (htm t ’u>y). There is nothing especially significant about the place except its tell-tale name, which makes no sense except in ancient Egyptian. In that language, and only in that language, Khatm T a w i means nothing less than ‘Fortress o f Egypt’. At one time, the ancient Egyptians must have maintained a military presence in the area. Their interest in West Arabia was quite natural. From there they im ported frankincense and myrrh — products of South Arabia and the coastlands o f the H orn of Africa, which were carried by land or sea to the tow ns o f Asir and the Hijaz and marketed there. Apart from frankincense and myrrh, the people o f ancient Egypt doubtlessly had other interests in West Arabia, for here was a land just across the sea, where fine w ood was available from the dense juniper and cypress forests o f the Asir highlands, at a sailing distance o f only one and a half days from the nearest harbour on the Nubian coast. There was also gold, copper and various precious stones from the areas further inland, as well as other products o f the region: excellent butter, honey, cereals, nuts, vegetable dyes, aromatics for the manufacture o f perfumes, plus a variety o f other vegetable, animal and mineral resources. In addition to these local products, the rich trade o f India reached East Arabia or South Arabia by sea, and was carried by caravan to the m arket towns of Asir and Hijaz for distribution to other lands. So far archaeologists have barely scratched

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the surface o f West Arabia, yet enough artefacts have been found to indicate an ancient Egyptian presence there. More indicative than these artefacts, however, are the countless place names o f ancient Egyptian derivation in the area — names which only make sense in the language o f ancient Egypt. K hatm Tawi, in this respect, is by no means the sole example. West Arabian place names which are, in fact, simply the names o f Egyptian gods make an impressive list. The following includes tw enty o f them, by no means all: Yasah (y st ): the Egyptian goddess Isis ( ’st) Al Yaslr (7 ysyr): the Egyptian god Osiris (wsyr) Al Yam am (7 ymn): the Egyptian god A m on (imn) Y anif (ynp ): the Egyptian god Anubis (inpw ) Al T urn (7 tm): the Egyptian god A tum (itm) Witn (w t n ): the Egyptian god Aton (itn) ‘Anaqah (' nqt ): the Egyptian goddess Anukis (‘nqt) Fatih (pth): the Egyptian god Ptah (pth) Mina (nmr): the Egyptian god Minu (imnw) Al N firi (7 n p ry ): the Egyptian god N epri (npri) N akhbah (nhbt): the Egyptian goddess Nekhbet (nhbt) Ra‘ (r‘): the Egyptian god Ra Al H aru and Al Harah (hr): the Egyptian god Horus (hr) H arshaf (hrsp): the Egyptian god Arsaphes (h rysf) Al Saqr ($qr): the Egyptian god Sokar (sqr) Khinas (hns): the Egyptian god Khons (hnsw) Subka (sbk ): the Egyptian god Sobk (sbk ) Safadah (spd): the Egyptian god Sopd (spdw) Khamin (limn): the Egyptian god C hnum (hnm) Al Shawriyah (7 swy): the Egyptian god Shu (sw) Place names o f Egyptian extraction, such as those above, are found all over West Arabia, including no less than six which are essentially Taw i (t’wy), one name which the ancient Egyptians gave to their native land, Egypt. These Egyptian names, however, tend to be concentrated in some areas m ore than others, one being in the neighbourhood o f Khamis Mushait in upper Wadi Bishah in inland Asir. Here the name o f Egypt does not survive as the Egyptian Tawi, which means the ‘tw o lands’ (dual o f (’), but as Misramah (msrm), the Arabicized form o f the Biblical Mizraim (msrym), which

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also means the ‘tw o lands’ (dual o f msr, vocalized Arabic misr , ‘province, land’). This Mizraim, as already seen, was the ‘Egypt’ o f Abraham. It was also the ‘E gypt’ o f another m ore colourful hero o f the Genesis narratives, Joseph. The reportedly brilliant career o f this Joseph was certainly not in the Egypt o f the Nile valley, where not a trace o f him has been found. Rather, it was in the thriving Egyptian colony o f Mizraim (as we shall henceforth call the present Misramah), in the Khamis Mushait highlands; a territory which must have included the whole o f Wadi Bishah, possibly extending southwards as far as the valley o f Wadi Najran, on the borders o f w hat is today N orth Yemen. A preliminary archaeological report on that area, published in 1981, indicates a high concentration o f archaeological sites around Khamis Mushait. The excavation o f these sites, one day, may throw m ore light on the nature o f the Egyptian colonization there. In the Genesis story, the person o f Joseph is a fusion o f more than one character, as has been shown to be the case w ith other heroes o f the Genesis lore. O n the one hand there was a ‘H eb rew ’ Joseph (39:14, 17; 41:12) whose brothers were ‘H ebrew s’ (43:32): the son o f Israel, grandson o f Abram the H ebrew (14:13), w ho came from the same ‘H ebron’ (37:14), in the ‘land o f Canaan’ (37:1), where his alleged great-grandfather Abram had lived. O n the other hand, there was also the Joseph w ho was the son o f the wily Jacob, w orthy heir o f his father’s unusual gifts for trickery. The first Joseph is clearly a figure o f legend — the eponymous ancestor claimed by an Israelite tribe called the Joseph. The second, I strongly suspect, took after his ow n family: like his father Jacob and his uncle Esau, his grandparents Isaac and Rebekkah, and his great-grandparents Abraham and Sarah, he was a god. W hat kind o f god? His name, Joseph (yivsp ), gives the secret away. It is the archaic substantive o f the Hebrew ysp, ‘add, continue, increase’ (cf. Arabic w sp, ‘grow fat’), which means that he was a god o f ‘continuity, increase, fatness’ — in short, o f worldly success. As the name o f a tribe, ‘J oseph’ survives as the name o f the Banu Y usuf (y w s p ) w ho inhabit the vicinity o f Khirban (the ‘H ebro n’ o f Genesis), in the same Qunfudhah hinterland o f the coastal parts o f the southern Hijaz and Asir which was the Biblical ‘land o f Canaan’, where Abram the H ebrew had lived (chapter 4). Joseph, reportedly, had tw o sons, Manasseh and Ephraim (41:51-52), w ho became the

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eponymous ancestors o f the tw o branches o f the Hebrew Israelite tribe o f Joseph. Today the tribe o f the Banu Y usuf in West Arabia is also called al-Far'ayn, which literally means ‘the tw o branches’. The same al-Far‘ayn, read as the dual o f the Biblical pr'h, can also mean ‘the tw o pharaohs’. This may explain how the legendary personality o f Joseph the H ebrew came to be confused with the mythical personality o f Joseph the god, and possibly also with the personality o f another, quasi-historical or historical Joseph o f ‘E g ypt’. This Joseph’s historicity comes into better focus if we consider that his ‘E gy pt’ was the West Arabian Egyptian colony o f Mizraim rather than the Egypt o f the Nile valley, where no trace o f his career has been found (see below). As the name o f a god, ‘Joseph’ survives as Al Yusif (7 ywsp), the name o f a village in the Asir highlands fringing Wadi Bishah from the west. It also survives, in Arabic translation, as Al Yazld (7 yzyd, from the verb zyd, ‘add, increase’): the name o f no less than five villages in different parts o f Asir, one o f them near Al ‘Uqbah (the ‘god Jacob’), in low er Wadi Bishah. Here the name of Joseph stands immortalized near that o f his father, both in the Arabic form. There is also epigraphic p ro o f o f the existence o f an ancient West Arabian god called Joseph, which will be considered in due course. In the Genesis story, Joseph the man (or tribe) and Joseph the god are continually confused (chapters 37, 39-50). This is clear from the fact that the father o f ‘J oseph’, in every episode, is called ‘Jacob’ in one sentence, and ‘Israel’ in the following. For the mom ent we shall leave aside the other confusion between these tw o Josephs on the one hand, and the third Joseph o f Mizraim on the other. The Genesis story o f Joseph, for example, begins w ith the announcement: ‘J oseph dwelt in... the land o f Canaan. This is the progeny o f Jacob’ (37:1-2). N ext we are told that ‘Israel loved Joseph more than all his sons’ (37:3). It is the same Israel w ho sends Joseph to inquire about his brothers w ho are out with their flocks (37:13); but it is Jacob, not Israel, w ho ‘rends his garments, and puts sackcloth upon his loins, and m ourns for his son for many days’ (37:34), when he is made to believe that a wild beast has devoured him. At the end o f the story, it is Jacob w ho ‘draws his feet into the bed, and breathes his last, and is gathered to his people’ (49:33); but it is Israel w ho is subsequently ‘em balm ed’ (50:2) and mourned, then carried to the ‘land o f Canaan’ to be buried there w ith his fathers in the cave o f Machpelah (50:13).

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As I see it, this regular alternation between calling Joseph’s father ‘Jacob’, then ‘Israel’, and in some cases ‘Israel’, then ‘J acob’, was deliberately intended by the redactors o f Genesis to blur the difference in identity between the tw o Josephs on the one hand, and Jacob and Israel on the other. Their interest, it seems to me, was to transform the legendary Joseph son o f Israel into the hero o f the entertaining story o f the mythological god Joseph the son o f Jacob. To begin with, a summary o f the story: The Joseph story As a youth o f seventeen, Joseph went out to herd the family flocks with some o f his brothers, and came back to his father with ‘an ill report o f them ’. This action caused great unpopularity w ith his brothers, which com pounded their envy o f Joseph as their father’s favourite. Worse still, Joseph repeated to his brothers tw o dreams in which he obviously saw himself, under different guises, as the one m em ber o f the family to w hom all the others would one day pay deference. His father rebuked him for having these dreams, but was secretly happy w ith what they implied (37:10-11). The brothers’ resentment o f Joseph turned into positive hatred w hen his doting and discriminating father presented him alone w ith a festive tunic (37:3) o f the sort that was later w orn by the virgin daughters o f kings (2 Samuel 13:18-19). One day, at the request o f his father, Joseph left Hebron, wearing the same tunic, to enquire about his elder brothers, w ho were herding the family flocks in distant Shechem. Failing to find them there, he pursued his older siblings to Dothan, where he was told they had gone. As they saw him approach, his brothers decided to kill him; so they seized him as soon as he arrived, stripped him o f his festive tunic, and cast him into a waterless pit. Caravaneers happened to be passing through D othan on their way to Mizraim, carrying ‘gum, balm and m y rrh ’ (37:25). Rather than leave Joseph to die o f thirst in the pit, the brothers decided to make some money by selling him to the caravaneers for tw enty shekels o f silver. Then they took his tunic, slaughtered a kid, and dipped the tunic in its blood. When their father saw the blood-stained tunic brought to him, he naturally concluded that his favourite son had been devoured by a wild beast and became prostrate w ith grief. In Mizraim the caravaneers w ho had bought Joseph from his

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brothers sold him to a local Egyptian official o f Pharaoh called Potiphar. This Potiphar was so pleased with the boy that he made him the chief steward o f his household, seeing how ‘successful’ (39:2) he was in all he did. Joseph’s youthful good looks, however, attracted Potiphar’s wife, w ho tried time and again to get the boy to take her to bed, but w ithout success. O ne day, when she found him alone, she caught him by his garment; but Joseph fled, leaving his garment in her hand. The w o m an now became vengeful and announced to everyone that Joseph had tried to rape her, but had run away when she cried out, leaving his garment behind as p roof o f his guilt. She told the same story to her husband when he came home. So Potiphar sent Joseph to the prison o f the king o f Mizraim. Here he was later joined by the butler and the baker o f the king, who had been condemned to prison because they had somehow offended their master. In prison Joseph w on the favour o f the warden, who put him in charge o f all the prisoners, am ong them the king’s butler and baker. One night these tw o had disturbing dreams, which Joseph volunteered to interpret. The butler’s dream, according to Joseph, indicated that he w ould be released from prison and restored to his former position in court in three days. The baker’s dream, however, meant that the unfortunate man would be taken out and hanged in three days. Joseph asked the butler to intercede for him with Pharaoh after his release, which actually followed in three days; but the butler forgot to do so. As for the baker, he was actually taken out after three days and hanged. Tw o years later Pharaoh had tw o disturbing dreams in succession during the course o f one night, and no one could interpret them. Then the butler rem em bered Joseph and his skill at dream interpretation, and told Pharaoh about him; so Joseph was brought out o f prison to interpret the tw o dreams. He told Pharaoh that his two dreams were essentially one in meaning. They were a warning that the land o f M izraim was going to enjoy seven years o f plenty, followed by seven years o f famine. Joseph advised Pharaoh to appoint a man to store sufficient provisions from the seven years o f plenty, to take care o f the seven years o f famine that were bound to follow. Impressed by the discretion o f Joseph, who was thirty years old at the time, Pharaoh decided to adopt his suggestion and appoint him as the man responsible for storing the necessary provisions for the

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impending years o f famine. He also gave him an Egyptian name and the daughter o f an Egyptian priest in marriage. Thus Joseph became, after Pharaoh, the most im portant man in Mizraim. When the seven years o f plenty were over, a terrible famine struck throughout the area. O nly in Mizraim was there sufficient bread from Joseph’s stores. From the land o f Canaan came the sons of Israel, sent by their father to buy grain. When they arrived in Mizraim, they appeared before Joseph. He recognized them, but they did not recognize him. He accused them o f being spies, put them in prison for three days, then released them and sold them the grain they wanted, on condition that they returned to him shortly with their youngest brother Benjamin, w ho was Joseph’s only full brother. As a security, Joseph kept one o f the men w ith him. As the others were returning home, they discovered that the money each man had paid for his grain had been put back in the m outh o f his sack. This greatly alarmed them, for they thought that on their return to Mizraim they would be accused o f theft. Back home, Israel w ould not be persuaded to send his youngest son Benjamin w ith his brothers to Mizraim, as Joseph had requested, until all the grain they had bought had been consumed and they were forced to return for more. This time they took w ith them double the am ount o f money, to make up for the silver which had somehow remained w ith them the first time. They also carried with them a present o f some o f the products o f their land: ‘some balm, some honey, gum, m yrrh, pistachio nuts and alm onds’ (43:11). Joseph received them gracefully, enquired about the health o f their father (who was also, o f course, his ow n father), and had food sent to them from his ow n table. When they came to leave, he not only had each m an’s money put in the m outh o f his sack as before, but also had his ow n silver cup placed in the m outh o f Benjamin’s sack. The brothers were hardly out o f Mizraim w hen Joseph’s guards followed them to search their sacks for the silver cup. They naturally found it where it had been placed, in Benjamin’s sack, and the men were taken back to Mizraim to be charged with theft. Joseph had every intention o f continuing w ith this game; but w hen his brothers were brought before him again, this time humbled and abject w ith apology, he was so overpowered w ith em otion that he finally told them w ho he really was. H e insisted that they go back to the land o f Canaan and return w ith their father. When they

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did, arriving w ith their father Israel in Beersheba, Joseph had Pharaoh send wagons to Beersheba to carry Israel and the w om en and children o f the family to Mizraim (46:5). Joseph arranged for all o f them to settle in the land o f Goshen, which belonged to Mizraim; then Joseph went up by chariot to Goshen to meet his father. In time, when Israel died, his son Joseph had him embalmed, and carried him back to the land o f Canaan, where he was duly buried in the cave o f his ancestors at Machpelah. The Arabian setting o f the story Topographically, the story o f Joseph fits into West Arabia in nearly every detail (see map p. 128). It starts in the ‘valley o f H ebron’, the hom e o f Joseph’s father Israel, in the ‘land o f Canaan’ — today Khirban, in the hinterland o f the coastal tow n of Qunfudhah (chapter 4). From there, Joseph first goes to seek his brothers in Shechem (skm), this particular Shechem being today Kashmah (ksm), in Rijal A lm a‘, about 140 kilometres south o f Khirban. When he does not find them there, he pursues them to D othan (dtn), today Dathanah (dtn), in Jabal Faifa, about 100 kilometres south-east o f Rijal Alma‘. Here, at Jabal Faifa, the mountain road winds inland, proceeding about 100 kilometres in the direction o f the north-west to reach Khamis Mushait. After buying Joseph from his brothers at Dothan, the caravaneers take him by this road to sell him to Potiphar in the Egyptian colony o f Mizraim (or Misramah) near Khamis Mushait. Beersheba, where Israel stops before actually reaching Mizraim, is today Shaba‘ah, within the precincts o f modern Khamis Mushait (see p. 90). As for Goshen {gsn ), where Joseph settled his father and brothers, it is today Ghithan (gtn), in the Balqarn hill country which flanks the lower course of Wadi Bishah from the west. With Goshen being located above Wadi Bishah in that direction, it was only natural that Joseph had to ‘go u p ’ (y ‘l , 46:29) to the place to meet his father. Genesis also tells us how the body o f Israel was carried from Mizraim for burial in the cave o f Machpelah (present-day Maqfalah, (see p. 77), in the land o f Hebron (Khirban). From Mizraim in upper Wadi Bishah, it was taken ‘u p ’ to the ‘threshing floor’ (grn ) o f Atad (ih-’td ), which is beyond the Jordan ('br h-yrdn)' (50:10), that place being called Abel-mizraim (’bl msrym 50:11) — thus according to the hitherto accepted translations o f the H ebrew original. In The Bible Came jrom Arabia, I explained at length w hy the ‘J ordan’ (h-yrdn) of

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the Hebrew Bible m ust have been a term denoting the great West Arabian escarpment, rather than the name o f the Jordan river in Palestine. One thing I did not point out is that the Egyptian records, citing the name o f the Biblical ‘Jordan’ as irdn, provide it with the ideogram for ‘hill country’ rather than the one for ‘w ater’ or ‘river’, a further indication that this ‘J ordan’ was not a river. From Misramah, near Khamis Mushait, Joseph and his party, who were taking Israel’s body for burial in Maqfalah in the Qunfudhah hinterland, on the maritime side o f Asir, would first have proceeded uphill in the direction o f the west, to reach the Asir highlands running along the edge o f the escarpment, which are called locally al-Tud (td , with the definite article; cf. Biblical h-’td for ‘Atad’). T o descend to the Qunfudhah hinterland, they would have crossed the ‘J ordan’ or escarpment, in the so-called Ballasmar region, to reach not a ‘threshing-floor’ (grn), but a place called Q arn (qrn), one o f many know n by this name in the vicinity. From there they would have followed the course o f the local wadi to the coast. Near Qarn on the peak o f Jabal Dirim (the particular ‘A tad’ o f Genesis 50), there is also a village called Wabil (wbl ) — apparently the Biblical ‘Abel’, or ’bl, once called ‘Abel-mizraim’, because it belonged to the Egyptian colony at Mizraim. There is definitely no ‘threshing floor o f Atad, which is beyond the Jordan’ in question. It is not the place names alone that indicate a West Arabian setting for the Joseph story; matters o f ecology are also im portant. The land o f Mizraim in upper Wadi Bishah is a land o f grain (see p. 101); not so the land o f the Q unfudhah hinterland, which is mainly devoted to pastoralism. Israel and his sons came from this region and were shepherds. In the hill country on the maritime side o f Asir, which I contend was the Biblical land o f Canaan, trees producing gum and balm are to be found, the gum trees peculiar to the area and its broader neighbourhood being the Commiphora mukul, which produces the prized ‘Meccan balsam’. Almonds and terebinths also grow there, one type o f terebinth (Pistacia terebinthus) producing an edible nut — in cultivation, the pistachio nut. The m yrrh tree, moreover, is found in those hills, as elsewhere in South-West Arabia. From the rocks o f the same rugged country, bedouins still extract an excellent honey, which they form into large cakes and sell in the local markets. Today this honey is sold to the rich at fabulous prices as it is considered a potent male aphrodisiac. W hen Israel sent his

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sons to Mizraim for the second time, he made them carry a present for Joseph o f the typical products o f their native region: ‘some balm, some honey, gum, myrrh, pistachio nuts and almonds’. O f these products, certainly the m yrrh and the gum could not have come from Palestine. Likewise, judging by the cargo they carried, the caravaneers w ho passed through Dothan, bought Joseph and took him on to Mizraim, could only have come from South Arabia. They arrived from ‘Gilead’ {gl'd, 37:25) — this one al-Ja‘diyyah (’1-g‘dy, in South Yemen) — carrying ‘gum, balm and m y rrh ’, again, typical South Arabian products. The ‘gum ’ in question m ust have been the frankincense gum, the best quality o f which comes from the coastlands o f the Arabian Sea. It was mainly to secure the precious frankincense and m yrrh o f South Arabia that Egyptian colonies such as Mizraim in Wadi Bishah had come to be established in the Arabian lands across the Red Sea. Certainly, no gum and myrrh are produced in the ‘Gilead’ o f the Transjordanian highlands, today called Jilla‘ad (gl'd), even if this is the original name o f the place, and not one given by later pilgrims. In any case, the etymological dictionaries o f Biblical H ebrew cite al-Ja‘d (’l-g‘d ), and hence al-Ja‘diyyah, as the accepted Arabic form o f the Biblical ‘Gilead’ (gl'd). Furthermore, the Khamis M ushait area of upper Wadi Bishah is still the main bread-basket o f Asir. A t all times, even w ithout famine, people must have travelled there from neighbouring regions to buy grain. In the Genesis story, Joseph is credited with having stored the grain o f the area in the years o f plenty to provide for years o f famine. The area’s actual ecology fits the story very well. T h e Joseph o f Israelite legen d At one level the Genesis story o f Joseph sets out to explain how the H ebrew Israelites came to be living, at one time, in the territory o f Mizraim — more specifically, in the land of Goshen — in lower Wadi Bishah, rather than in their original ‘land o f Canaan’, on the maritime side o f Asir. The explanation given is perfectly plausible: they were made to settle in the area, and were provided with every facility for the purpose, by a H ebrew kinsman (Joseph) w ho happened to have risen to a position o f great pow er among the ancient Egyptian colonists at Mizraim. There is no reason why this should not have been, at least partly, the case.

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The story recalls some interesting details about the ‘Joseph’ in question, which all but completely establish his historicity. Regardless o f his original H ebrew name, he had assumed an Egyptian name, Zaphenath-paneah (spnt p ‘nh, 41:45), which has been interpreted as the corruption o f an Egyptian original, meaning ‘the god speaks and he lives’. Like the Egyptians, he was clean-shaven (41:14). He first rose to public office in M izraim w hen he was thirty (41:46), and was married to an Egyptian w om an called Asenath (41:45, 50), whose father, Potiphera, was the priest o f O n (’«, 41:45) — possibly a shortened form o f the Egyptian wnn-njrw, or ‘O nnophris’, the name given to the resurrected Osiris. A village called D hu A w an (the ‘g o d’ ’urn, or ‘O n ’) in the Medina region o f the Hijaz still carries the nam e o f this Egyptian deity. Such detail, which the story offers fortuitously, m ust be authentic; it is n o t the sort o f detail normally invented. It is also possible, as Genesis seeks to explain, that the Hebrews, who were a shepherd folk living at first in the woodlands o f coastal Asir, should have migrated at one time to the grain land o f Wadi Bishah to escape a famine, and som ehow have settled there. Famines can occur in coastal Asir, not only because o f the periodic droughts that hit other parts o f West Arabia, but also because the deep gorges o f that particular area provide an excellent breeding ground for locusts — a fact which geographers o f the region rarely fail to note. It is also plausible that the H ebrew shepherds o f the Qunfudhah hinterland o f coastal Asir should have led their flocks to graze on the mountainsides o f Rijal Alma‘ and Jabal Faifa, 150 and 250 kilometres to the south. In pastoral regions shepherds frequently cover such distances in search o f good pasture. What is not plausible, however, is that a youth o f seventeen, at the request o f his doting father, should have gone running these long distances, across wild and rugged country, in search o f his brothers, alone, and clad in his best festive tunic. Here m y ow n doubts, at least, begin. Joseph’s garm ent A ‘coat o f many colours’, say the older translations (e.g. AV); a ‘long robe with sleeves’, say the more recent ones (e.g. RSV); the plain fact is that the meaning o f the H ebrew ktnt psys remains a matter o f conjecture, because no one really know s w hat the Hebrew p'sy's actually means. I am convinced it is the equivalent o f the Arabic

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o f a priest, but only three times as the dress o f a man, and no more than once as the dress o f a w om an. As for the expression ktnt psys, it is used in the Bible only to describe tw o garments: the tunic of the youthful Joseph and the tunic traditionally w orn by the virgin daughters o f kings. Had his garment been a simple ktnt, Joseph, m ore likely than not, w ould have been a priest, or perhaps a youth destined for priesthood. Considering that it is repeatedly described as a ktnt psys, or ‘gem-studded tunic’, the least he could have been is a high priest, if not a god. In the opening chapter o f the Genesis story, Joseph’s ‘gem-studded tunic’ features with particular prominence. First, we are told that his father, w ho preferred him to all his brothers, made it for him as a sign o f his special love (37:3). Second, we are told that w hen he caught up with his brothers at Dothan, they first stripped him o f the tunic (37:23), then cast him into the waterless pit, before selling him as a slave for twenty shekels o f silver. Third, we are told that Joseph’s tunic was dipped into the blood o f a slaughtered kid, then sent to his father, to deceive him into believing that his favourite son had been eaten by a wild beast (37:31f.). Then we have the story o f Joseph in Mizraim, where he starts from humble beginnings to achieve great prominence. This tale is remarkably reminiscent o f other stories told about the fertility gods o f the ancient N ear East (e.g. Adonis, Osiris) w ho die or w ho are taken to have died in one place, only to reappear again, alive and triumphant, elsewhere. What is involved, it seems to me, is a passion story, in a way much like that o f Jesus, who was betrayed by one o f his ow n disciples for thirty pieces o f silver; w ho was made to wear the purple robe o f a king before his trial; and whose ‘garm ents’ were subsequently divided by casting lots among those w ho were charged with his crucifixion. * Fine garments, one might say, make fine gods. Joseph’s ‘garm ent’ features again in the story o f his problem w ith Potiphar’s wife, which ended with his long im prisonm ent — his second passion. This time* it is a bgd, which can be any kind o f garment, from the rags o f a leper to the ceremonial robes o f kings or priests. Potiphar’s wife, in this story, seizes Joseph by his ‘garm ent’, which remains in her hand w hen he flees her adulterous advances; she uses the same ‘garm ent’

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to charge him with attempted rape, and so have him throw n into prison. The m y th o f the g o d Joseph In the Genesis story, as I see it, the Joseph w ho was the eponymous ancestor o f an Israelite tribe is identified, first, w ith the Egyptianized Hebrew Zaphenath-paneah, w ho was the benefactor o f his fellow Hebrew settlers in the territory o f Mizraim; second, with a god called Joseph w ho personified worldly w isdom and success — the god whose name survives in the Asir highlands as that o f the yillage o f Al Y usif (literally, ‘god Joseph’). Judging by his name, this Al Y usif (yw sp , or ysp) could have been none other than the historically attested Arabian god Asaf (’sp), who was still revered as an idol in the Hijaz and other parts o f the peninsula before the trium ph of Islam. In Genesis, the attributes given to Joseph could have been those o f a superior man, but they are especially suited for a god: 1. He was ‘beautiful in form, and beautiful in appearance’ (yph t ’r w-yph mr’h, 39:6).

2. He was especially favoured: first, as a son by his father; second, as a purchased slave by his master; third, as a prisoner by the warden o f the prison; fourth, as a public official by a powerful king. 3. He caused all those who favoured him to prosper. 4. He had an unfailing, uncanny ability to achieve personal success out o f adversity. 5. He claimed the pow er o f divination (44:15), and used the special silver cup in which he normally drank for that purpose (44:5). 6. He was a ‘dream er’ (37:9) and an expert interpreter o f dreams (40:5-22; 41:1-32; 42:9), and repeatedly declared the proper inter­ pretation o f dreams to be a divine prerogative (40:8; 41:16, 32). 7. He was unusually far-sighted, wily and resourceful. These seem to me to be the attributes o f the Biblical Joseph as Al Yusif, the ancient West Arabian god o f good management and success. As a ‘dream er’ and an interpreter o f dreams, this god Joseph could have been revered in his time as an oracle, whose pronouncements were sought on problematic questions. Considering that he was the son o f ‘J acob’, or Al ‘Uqbah, the god o f progeny; the nephew o f Esau, or Al ‘Isa, the god o f masculinity; the grandson

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o f Isaac, or Al Husaykah, the god o f wells; and the great-grandson o f Abraham, or Abu Ruhm, the god o f rain (chapter 5), one may assume that Joseph, as Al Yusif, was the central figure in an ancient cult o f worldly success which formed part o f a broader West Arabian cult o f fertility. His special ‘sign’, it seems, was his brilliant raiment — his ktnt psys, or ‘gem-studded tunic’, which no other male figure in the Hebrew Bible wears. A nother o f his special ‘signs’, perhaps, was his special ‘silver cup’ by which he divined. T o disentangle the story o f this particular god from the mixed Genesis lore o f Joseph, one m ust follow the Joseph with the first special ‘sign’ — the brilliant raiment. He first appears as the son o f a doting father w ho presents him w ith his ‘gem-studded tunic’. As I understand it, the god o f responsible masculinity, and hence of progeny (Jacob), makes his main investment in a ‘son’ who is a god o f ‘increase’, hence o f prosperity and success (Joseph). This arouses the envy o f the ‘brothers’ o f the god Joseph, and they decide to kill him. These ‘brothers’ are not really the sons o f Israel and therefore the eponymous ancestors o f the different tribes o f Israel. Rather, they are other gods o f the West Arabian pantheon, jealous o f the privileges enjoyed by Joseph as a god o f success. In the Genesis version o f the story, the ‘brothers’ do not kill Joseph; instead they only make him appear to have been eaten by a wild beast, while they actually sell him as a slave. In the original story, as I imagine it, the ‘brothers’ o f the young and handsome god, after stripping him o f his brilliant raiment, actually arrange for him to be mauled and killed (and perhaps eaten) by a wild beast, just as the young and handsome Adonis, in another ancient N ear Eastern myth, is mauled and killed by a wild boar. I also suspect that in the original story, Joseph’s godly raiment was not dipped in the blood o f a freshly slaughtered kid, but drenched in the go d ’s own youthful blood. O ther stories are told about the blood o f various gods who die and rise from the dead: the blood which flowed from the wounded feet o f Adonis was immortalized by the red flower o f the anemone; the blood flowing from the w ounded side o f the crucified Jesus became the wine o f the Christian eucharist. In m y opinion, the fact that the ‘brothers’ first throw Joseph into a waterless pit is also significant. The waterless pit was a dry well; Isaac, the grandfather o f the god Joseph, was the god o f ‘overflowing wells’ (chapter 5). This episode o f the Joseph m yth must have been

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deliberately intended to underline the passion o f the young god. Traditionally, Eastern Christians, in m ourning the death o f Jesus on Good Friday, have sung: ‘Today he was suspended on a wooden pole, he who has suspended the world on water!’ Perhaps, at one time, the devotees o f the god Joseph, in m ourning his passion, used to sing: ‘Today he was cast in a waterless pit, he w hose grandfather was the god o f overflowing wells!’ In the next episode o f the myth, the god Joseph reappears alive and well in Mizraim, where Genesis begins to confuse his story with that o f the Egyptianized Hebrew Zaphenath-paneah. While this Zaphenath-paneah, in the Egyptian colony o f Mizraim, was the chancellor o f Pharaoh as the local ‘king’, wearing his ‘signet ring’ (41:42), the god Joseph, as the god o f success, becomes the associate and chief agent o f Pharaoh as Al Fari‘ or Al Fira'ah, the god of ‘running streams’, hence ofirrigation (see p. 97). A m ong the ancient Egyptians, it was com m on to regard the ‘person’ o f a ruler, or his ‘essence’ (Egyptian ka , or qi, ‘form, im age’) as a god. This special Egyptian term survives in tw o West Arabian place names, Q aw and Q awah (both qw)\ and perhaps the god o f ‘running stream s’, Al Fari‘ or ‘Pharaoh’, was regarded as the ka o f the ‘king’ or viceroy of E g ypt’s West Arabian raj, long before the kings o f E gypt itself came to be called Pharaoh (Egyptian pr ") in about 1550 at the earliest, but more definitely after about 950 BC. Before his special gift for the prudent management o f agricultural resources came to the attention o f Pharaoh as a god o f irrigation, the god Joseph in the guise o f a slave had been in the service o f Potiphar, w ho was a ‘eunuch’ (srys, cf. Arabic srys, ‘im potent or sterile male’) o f Pharaoh (37:36) — I would say one o f the castrated priests o f Pharaoh as a god; as indicated by his name (pwtypr , Egyptian p ’tpr, ‘bread-offering o f the house’, i.e. o f the ‘tem ple’). Translations o f Genesis describe him as ‘captain o f the guard’, the H ebrew original (sr h-tbhym ) yielding more readily the sense o f ‘lord o f the butchers’. I believe he was, quite simply, the ‘lord (high priest) o f Bathan (bthn)' — one o f tw o villages by this name in the hill country o f the Jizan hinterland, south o f Khamis Mushait, and hence o f Misramah, the Biblical Mizraim. As a slave o f the castrated high priest, Joseph is amorously pursued by the high priest’s frustrated wife. When she fails to persuade the handsome young god to seduce her, she tears his ‘garm ent’ from him, trum ps up against him a charge o f attempted

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rape, and uses the possession o f his ‘garm ent’ to support her charge. Still disguised as a slave, the young god is condemned to prison. It is at this stage, more than anywhere else, that the confusion between the m yth o f the god Joseph and the apparently historical career o f the Egyptianized Hebrew Zaphenath-paneah begins to stand out in the original Hebrew text o f the Genesis story (39:20 - 40:23). At some point in his career, Zaphenath-paneah, it seems, w ho was the historical ‘Joseph’, had actually spent some time in a penal colony called Beyt ha-Sohar (byt h-shr, the ‘temple’ o f Sohar, first mentioned 39:20) — today the village o f Al Zuhayr (the ‘god’ Zuhayr, or zh y r), a short distance to the south o f Khamis Mushait. This village carries the name o f a m oon god, the Arabic shr (as sahur) and its variant z h r (as z a h r and its diminutive zuh ayr) being attested epithets for the ‘m o o n ’. In translation the Biblical shr has been taken to mean ‘prison’ (from shr in the Arabic sense o f ‘watch, guard’), which would make the expression byt h-shr mean ‘the house o f the prison’, not simply ‘the prison’. According to Genesis, Beyt ha-Sohar (the present village o f Al Zuhayr) was ‘a place where the k ing’s prisoners were kept’ (39:20). The unnamed ‘lord’ or ‘master’ ( ’dn, 39:20) who sent the historical Joseph to this penal colony must have been none other than the ruler o f Mizraim w hom he served. There the historical Joseph was placed in a ‘pit’ (bwr, 41:14) — presumably, a dungeon — until he was finally released (ibid.) and restored to the service of Pharaoh, as ‘king o f Mizraim’ (41:46). In the myth, the god Joseph, who is an entirely different figure, is also imprisoned, but in a different place — not Beyt ha-Sohar, which was a place reserved for political prisoners, but the ‘temple o f the high priest o f Bathan’ (b yt sr tbhym, 40:3-4), w ho was none other than the castrated priest Potiphar. The redactors o f Genesis, alert to the fact that two different prisons were involved, made a point o f identifying the ‘temple o f the high priest o f Bathan’, upon first mention (40:3) as being the same as Beyt ha-Sohar, thus strengthening the fusion between the identities o f Joseph the god and the historical Zaphenath-paneah. I shall not further labour the point here, but it is certainly one to be kept in mind. There are tw o prisons in question; hence, what we have must be a fusion o f tw o different stories: one about the imprisonment o f the historical ‘Joseph’ in the dungeons o f Pharaoh as the king o f Mizraim; the other about the im prisonment o f the

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god Joseph in the temple o f the god Pharaoh at Bathan, which was kept by the high priest Potiphar. N o w to return to the story: In the prison o f Potiphar’s temple, Joseph becomes acquainted not with the ‘butler’ (msqh) and the ‘baker’ ('p h) o f the king of Mizraim (40:1), but with tw o other high priests o f the god Pharaoh, both o f them, like Potiphar, his ‘eunuchs’ (srysyus, 40:2; srysy pr'h, 40:7), who had angered him by their mismanagement o f affairs. The first was the ‘high priest o f the Masqa com m unity’ (sr h-msqym, 40:9); the other was the ‘high priest o f the Wafiyah com m unity’ (sr h-’p y m , 40:16). To this day, both Masqa (msq) and Wafiyah (wpy ) are villages o f the Khamis Mushait vicinity, near Misramah or Mizraim. In Hebrew, the names o f these tw o villages w ould mean, respectively, ‘butler’ (or ‘well-irrigated’) and ‘baker’ (or ‘baking’). Joseph reveals to both these high priests his supernatural ability to interpret dreams. O f these tw o high priests, the one o f Wafiyah (or ‘baking’), responsible for grain production and storage for bread, has mismanaged the affairs o f the god Pharaoh so badly that he is put to death. But the life o f the high priest o f Masqa, wTho apparently has charge o f the god Pharaoh’s ‘irrigation’ schemes, is spared; he is released and restored to his post. It is this high priest o f Masqa who, reportedly, tells Pharaoh about the unusual talents o f Joseph. Thereupon Pharaoh, as the god o f irrigation, orders the release of the young god from prison, arrays him in ‘garments o f fine linen’ (41:42), and entrusts to him the management o f his grain resources — formerly the function o f the discredited high priest o f Wafiyah, whose execution the god Joseph him self had prophesied (and perhaps arranged). In one verse o f the story, there is a subtle hint that Pharaoh recognized Joseph as a fellow god: ‘a man w ho has the spirit o f god in h im ’ ( ’ys ’sr rwh ’Ihym bus, 41:38). Perhaps he adopted him as an associate god, to take full charge o f the prosperity o f the realm under his paramount jurisdiction. As the resourceful god o f success, Joseph, or Al Yusif, appears to have been credited in ancient West Arabian m ythology with the institution o f grain storage; perhaps with the invention o f the silo. He was also credited with instituting the royal m onopoly o f agricultural land (47:13-25), which became standard Egyptian practice (47:26) — not only in the Egyptian colony o f Mizraim in inland Asir, but also in Egypt itself, as is know n from Egyptian records.

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D o I overinterpret the Joseph story here? Perhaps I do. The fact remains, however, that the names o f Joseph (Al Yusif) and Pharaoh (Al Fari‘, or Al Fira‘ah) do survive on the map o f West Arabia to this day as the names o f gods, introduced by the Semitic ’I, or El (Arabicized as Al), for ‘god’. Add to this the undoubted fact that the story o f Joseph’s im prisonment is clearly a fusion o f two stories, as dem onstrated above. Yet a further matter to keep in mind is that the language o f m ythology is highly figurative and allegorical. Literally, it says one thing; cryptically, something else. In a typical myth, the explicit is expected to entertain the layman; the esoteric is to instruct the initiate in the mystery religion or cult to which the m yth relates. O ne may join the laity and read the beautiful story o f Joseph, as explicitly told in Genesis, for pure entertainment. To understand its esoteric content, as it was originally expounded in the closed circles o f cult initiates, one has no choice but to look within.

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7 T he Wandering Aram ean

The densely woven tapestry o f Genesis ought to be unw oven thread by thread. In the tw o preceding chapters, I distinguished between tw o ‘J acobs’ in the Genesis narrative: one w ho was actually a Jacob, and another who was not. The first I identified as being the god o f ‘progeny’ Al ‘Uqbah; the second, as Israel o f Hebron — like Abram the H ebrew o f Hebron (chapter 4), a claimed ancestor o f the Hebrew Israelite tribes o f the region. In drawing the distinction between these tw o Biblical ‘J acobs’, I limited m yself to essentials in order not to clutter the text w ith too much detail. I also avoided mentioning a third Jacob, who is better dealt with separately. He is the Jacob w ho first appears as a distinct character in Genesis 28, where he can easily be identified and labelled according to his special attributes. His person can then be tracked dow n in the chapters that follow, where his story is blended, episode by episode, and even verse by verse, with the story o f Jacob the god, and more particularly with the story o f Israel. This particular Jacob is an Aramean; he is depicted in Genesis 28 as the son o f the Isaac w ho was the son o f Abram the Aramean. When the time comes for him to marry, his father sends him to Paddan-aram (pdn ’rm, or ‘the Paddan o f A ram ’), to take a wife from am ong his Aramean kin. Instead o f one, he takes two, Leah and Rachel, w ho are the daughters o f his maternal uncle Laban — ‘Laban the Aramean’ (Ibn h-’rmy, 25:20; 28:5; 31:20, 24), w ho actually speaks Aramaic (31:47). Jacob stays for many years in Paddan-aram with his uncle, tending his cattle and flocks, and reportedly siring eleven

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sons and a daughter by his tw o wives and their respective maids, Zilphah and Bilhah; then he falls out w ith his uncle and returns with his family to his original homeland — apparently to Shechem (35:4), the Qisamah o f the Zahran highlands in the southern Hijaz, where his alleged grandfather Abram the Aramean had once lived. M ore a figure o f legend than o f history, the Jacob in question appears to have personified an Aramean folk o f that region bearing that name. In the Genesis story, Jacob the Aramean is not left to stop at his Shechem, in the Zahran highlands; instead, he is made to proceed further south ‘to the land o f Canaan’ (31:18): the maritime highlands o f Asir in the hinterland o f the coastal tow n o f Qunfudhah, where Israel the H ebrew o f H ebron (today Khirban) used to live (chapter 6). T o reach the area, he allegedly crosses the ‘pass’ (m'br) ofjab b o k (ybq ), today Waqbah (wqb), near ‘H eb ro n ’, or Khirban, after which his m ovem ents become intricately confused with those o f Israel, with w h om he is now definitely identified. It is precisely at this point that Genesis comes forward w ith a special story to explain how Jacob had his name changed to Israel (32:22-29): That same night he arose and took his tw o wives, his tw o maids, and his eleven children and crossed the pass o fjab b o k . He took them and sent them across the valley (h-nhl ), and likewise everything that he had. And Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until the breaking o f the day. W hen the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he touched the hollow o f his hip; and Jacob’s hip was put out o f joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, ‘Let me go, for the day is breaking.’ But he said, ‘I will not let you go, unless you bless m e.’ And he said to him, ‘What is your name?’ And he said, ‘Jacob.’ T hen he said, ‘Your name shall no m ore be called Jacob, but Israel (ysr’l), for you have striven (verb srh) w ith God (7) and w ith men, and have prevailed

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This Genesis version, o f what m ust have been an older story, is not only intended to identify Jacob the Aramean with Israel the Hebrew, but also to elaborate on a folk etym ology o f the name Israel (for my ow n suggested etymology o f the name, see The Bible Came f o m Arabia, p. 124). The original story, as I see it, must have been part o f the m ythology o f the god Jacob (Al ‘Uqbah) and his strife with Yahweh, w ho only manages to disable him as a god o f progeny by putting his hip out o f joint, leaving him limping (32:31). One must bear in mind here that the male role in the production of progeny involves movements o f the ‘hip’ which, no less than the ‘thigh’, can be symbolic o f masculine prowess. Genesis goes on to explain in the story that the Israelites do not eat the sciatic muscle o f animals (the ‘sinew o f the hip’) because ‘Jacob’ (not ‘Israel’) was struck on this muscle (32:32). In the cult o fjaco b as Al ‘Uqbah, the god o f progeny, it is possible that the ‘sinew o f the hip’ was originally not eaten because it was considered sacred, being a symbol o f the generative powers o f that god. This ritual abstention from eating the sciatic muscle o f animals was perhaps inherited by the ancient Yahweh cult o f the Israelites from the older cult o f the god Jacob, which it otherwise obliterated. Once denuded o f his divinity, the god Jacob came to be identified with the legendary figure o f Israel as the eponymous ancestor o f the Israelites. Hence, as in the Genesis story quoted above, ‘Jacob’, after the god Yahweh had disabled him by putting his hip out o f joint, becomes ‘Israel’. T he w anderings o f j a c o b the Aram ean O ur concern in the present chapter is not w ith Jacob the god, but with Jacob the Aramean. Before he is made to proceed toward the ‘land o f Canaan’ to become fused with Israel, this particular Jacob holds together very well. To begin with let us consider his name. In its consonantal structure, the name ofjacob the Aramean (y ‘qb) is identical with that o fja c o b the god, or Al ‘Uqbah. In Hebrew, however, as in Arabic, the verb ‘qb, as already indicated, has different meanings. As the substantive o f it, ‘J acob’, as y ‘qb, can mean ‘progeny’ (see p. 104); but it can also mean ‘steep ground’ (as in the H ebrew ‘aqob), or ‘difficult ascent, mountain pass, defile’ (as in the Arabic ‘aqabah ). In the highlands o f the southern Hijaz, a num ber o f mountain passes (Arabic ‘iqab, plural o f ‘aqabah ) run across the great West Arabian escarpment (the yrdn or ‘Jordan’ o f the Hebrew

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Bible) to connect the highlands w ith the coastal lowlands. A m odern gazetteer o f the Zahran region lists the names o f thirty-four such passes in that area alone. The author o f the same gazetteer dwells on the ecological importance o f these mountain passes or ‘iqab, in the southern Hijaz. Here the local folk have traditionally practised transhumance, moving their residence between the highlands and the coastal lowlands according to the seasons. The Jacob (or y ‘qb) folk, as the people o f the ‘mountain passes’ of that area, probably received their name from this pattern o f living. Their name actually survives there in the village o f al-Ya‘aq!b (exactly y'qb), whose name, w ith its present Arabic vocalization, literally means ‘the Jacob folk’, i.e. ‘the people of the mountain passes’. In Genesis 28 a lame attempt is made to identify Jacob the Aramean as a descendant o f Abram o f Beersheba (chapter 4), by making him set out on his wanderings from the same Beersheba (28:10). As he was actually o f the same stock as A bram the Aramean, this Jacob must, in fact, have started his wanderings from the Zahran highlands — possibly from Qisamah, or ‘Shechem’ (see above). From there, Jacob ‘w ent towards Haran (hrn)' (28:10), already identified as Khirin (hrn), in the Taif highlands, north o f the Zahran region (see p. 81). N ext, he proceeded ‘tow ard the land o f Beney Q edem ’ (’rsh bny qdm, 29:1) — not ‘the land o f the people o f the east’, as it is usually taken to mean, but that o f the Bani Jadhm a (bnygdm) folk — according to the Arabic records, the ancient inhabitants o f the Medina region and its environs in the central Hijaz. The exact place where he arrived was Paddan (pdn), today the large village of Dafmah (dpn), about 230 kilometres north-east o f Taif, and roughly the same distance south-east o f Medina. The local people told him they were originally from Haran (29:4), home territory o f Abram the Aramean’s folk. As he first journeyed from the Zahran highlands towards Haran, Jacob reportedly stopped to sleep at a place called Bethel (byt ’I), where he had a curious dream: he saw a ladder set up between the earth and heaven, with Yahweh standing above the ladder, while his angels ascended and descended on it (28:12-15). At this place, we are further told, there used to be a city called Luz (Iw z , 28:19), while ‘below Bethel’ there was a ‘w o o d ’ (’Iwn, usually rendered ‘oak’, or ‘terebinth’) called A llon-bakuth (’Iwn bkwt). With these given coordinates, the position o f the Bethel of the dream o f ‘J acob’s ladder’ can be fixed with complete precision. It was not the Butaylah

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o f the Zahran highlands (see p. 81), but the barren ridge o f Jabal BatTlah (btl), east o f Taif. In the same area there is a village called Alyanah al-Dul ( ’lyn dwl), whose name combines w hat is clearly the Hebrew w ord for ‘wood, forest’ (’Iwn ) and a corruption o f the name Luz (Iw z). Nearby, also, is a tract o f basaltic wilderness with thorn trees, called to this day Bakawiyyat (b k w y t ). This, beyond doubt, was the Biblical Allon-bakuth, or ‘w o od ’ o f Bakuth (b k w t ). The whole setting is quite bleak. When Jacob awoke from his dream he reportedly exclaimed: ‘H o w awesome is this place!’ (28:17). O n his return journey from Paddan-aram w ith his wives and children, cattle and sheep, Jacob the Aramean ‘crossed the river’ (h-nhr) which is the great valley o f Wadi Adam, south-east o f Taif, then proceeded in the direction o f M ount Gilead (hr h-gl‘d, 31:21) — the coastal slopes o f the Zahran highlands which end at the present village o f al-Ja‘dah (’l-g'd). There he reached a place called Mahanaim (:mhnym , 32:2, plural or dual o f mhn) — today the village o f Mahna (mhn). To reach the coastal slopes o f the Zahran highlands from the T aif region, which lies inland, Jacob had to cross the ‘J ordan’ (yrdn ), or ‘escarpment’, to Wadi Adam. According to Genesis 32:10b, he says in his ow n w ords after making this crossing: At MaqlT I crossed this escarpment, until I was in Sheney from Hanoth. This indicates that Jacob started his journey hom ew ard from Hanoth (hnwt ), which is today the oasis o f Hanit (hnyt ), in the Qasim region east o f Dafmah — the Biblical Paddan-aram. From there he set out southwards to cross the escarpment (h-yrdn, the Biblical ‘J ordan’) at Maqli (mqly ) — today Maqala (mqV), in upper Wadi Adam, directly west o f the escarpment south o f Taif. Finally, he reached Sheney (sny), which is today the village o f Shayan (syn) in the same Wadi Adam. So far, the w ords attributed to Jacob on the occasion have been misinterpreted by translators to mean the following: ‘With only m y staff I crossed this Jordan (b-mqly ‘brty ’t h-yrdn hzh)\ and now I have become tw o companies (w -‘th hyyty l-sny m-hnwt)' (RSV). The confusion arose by taking l-sny to mean ‘into tw o ’, and misreading the original m-hnwt, or ‘from hnwt ’, as mhnwt, plural o f mhnh, to mean ‘companies’ Incidentally, the expression for ‘tw o companies’ in Biblical H ebrew w ould be sny

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It was actually the redactors o f Genesis who first took the expression l-sny mhnwt to mean ‘into tw o companies’. In fact, they built a story around it. Their intent was to complete the identification o f the person ofjacob the Aramean with that o f Israel the Hebrew. To be the same person as Israel, w ho had a brother called Edom (the E dom confused with Esau, see chapter 5), Jacob had to be the brother o f this same Edom. So the following story was invented (32:3-8): W hen Jacob reached Mahanaim, he sent word to his brother ‘Esau in the land o f E d om ’ to notify him o f his arrival in his neighbourhood. But Jacob feared his brother Esau, w ith w hom he had once parted on bad terms. Therefore, he divided his family and retinue into ‘tw o companies’, so that if they encountered his brother Esau (or rather Edom), and he destroyed one company, the other one would be able to escape. As it ultimately turned out, the reunion between the tw o brothers was a cordial one (33:1-15). What is im portant though is not the story, but the purpose it was invented to serve. It identified Jacob the Aramean as the brother o f Edom, who was actually the brother o f Israel the Hebrew, and so gave this Jacob another o f the distinguishing attributes o f Israel. Where did Jacob the Aramean finally settle? After the arrival ofjacob the Aramean at ‘Mahanaim’ or Mahna, in the Zahran region, his story becomes confused at every point with that o f Israel the Hebrew o f Hebron. We are actually told that God changed his name from Jacob to Israel not once, but twice (32:28; 35:10) — no doubt for added emphasis. Whoever fused the stories o f these tw o legendary figures into one had considerable explaining to do. From now on Israel is sometimes called Jacob, as well as Jacob being called Israel, which adds to the confusion. To determine who is w ho at every step, all we have to rely on are the geographical indicators preserved in the Genesis text, bearing in mind that the same person cannot be in tw o different places at the same time. U pon his return from Paddan-aram, Jacob the Aramean did not go to the ‘land o f Canaan’, in the Qunfudhah hinterland, to cross to the valley o f ‘J abbok’ (Waqbah) there (see above). This was the territory o f Israel the Hebrew. From Mahna, on the maritime slopes o f the Zahran region, he simply ‘w ent u p ’ (7/i) to ‘Bethel’ (35:1) —

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this one the present Butaylah, right on the escarpment, in the highlands o f the same region. In short, at the end o f his wanderings, he returned to the same area where his alleged forebears, Abram the Aramean and his son Isaac, had been settled. In the text o f Genesis 35, this ‘Bethel’ is taken to be Jabal Batilah, at ‘Luz’ (35:6), where Jacob had his dream about the ladder (see above). T o confuse matters further, the place is said to be located in the ‘land o f Canaan’ (35:6), apparently in reference to the village also called Batilah in Rijal Alma‘, in the southern reaches o f Asir (see p. 89). O ne can tell, however, that the ‘Bethel’ in question was none other than the Butaylah o f the Zahran highlands, because Jacob could readily get from there to the nearby Qisamah, or ‘Shechem’ (35:4). Moreover, the barren ridge o f Jabal Batilah is hardly a place where anyone w ould choose to settle o f his ow n free will. Like the present inhabitants o f the Zahran highlands, in antiquity the Aramean folk o f the same region also practised transhumance, moving dow n into the valleys to the west according to the season. Thus we find Jacob descending to Wadi A dam w ith his pregnant wife Rachel, in the direction o f ‘Ephrath’ (’p rt), today the village o f Furat {prt), in the lower course o f that valley. O n the way, Rachel died in childbirth, and was buried at ‘Bethlehem’ (byt Ihm, the ‘temple o f Ihm') (35:19), today the village called U m m Lahm (’m Ihm, the ‘goddess Ihm’), near Furat, in the same valley. The identification o f this U m m Lahm as being the ‘Bethlehem’ o f the H ebrew Bible has been considered in m ore detail in The Bible Came from Arabia. The question o f Judah The historical Israelites were a confederation o f different West Arabian tribes and folk, some o f H ebrew stock, others Aramean. The fact that there was an Aramean element am ong them, o f enough importance to claim attention, is disclosed by the confession the Israelites were enjoined to make before Yahweh in D euteronom y 26:5: ‘A wandering Aramean is m y father; and he went down to Mizraim w ith a small number; and there he became a great nation, great, mighty and populous’. As far as we can tell, Jacob the Aramean never w ent to Mizraim; it was Israel, the eponym ous ancestor o f the Hebrew Israelites, w ho at one time migrated there (chapter 6). In a tribal confederation, however, the m yth o f a com m on ancestor is o f vital importance, because it makes for solidarity; w ithout it,

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the confederation can easily fall apart. Thus, in Deuteronomy, Jacob, w ho is no doubt the ‘wandering A ram ean’, is made to go to Mizraim (which he probably never did) in order to become the same person as Israel, and thereby the ancestor o f the Hebrew as well as o f the Aramaic elements in the confederation o f Israel. In Genesis, as already noted, the identification o f Jacob w ith Israel is carried out more elaborately by a fusion o f their originally different stories into one, episode by episode. The question is, who were originally the Aramean folk, as distinct from the H ebrew folk, who ultimately joined the confederation o f Israel? In Genesis, Jacob (as Jacob, or as Israel) is depicted as the father o f twelve sons whose descendants were the twelve tribes o f Israel. In one instance, however, Judah is isolated from his brothers — he ‘goes d o w n ’ from them — and a special story is told about him (38:1-30). Here is a synopsis o f the story, set against its West Arabian topography: 1. Judah ‘went dow n’ to a man from Adullam ( ‘dim) whose name was Hirah (hyrh), and he met the daughter o f a man called Shua (su>‘), w ho m he married (38:1-2). The three names cited here survive as place names in the Taif region, dow nhill from the Zahran highlands to the north: they are those o f the villages o f D a‘alimah (d'lm), Hirah (hyrh) and Sha‘yah (s‘y), all three in close proximity. 2. Shua’s daughter bore Judah three sons: Er (V), Onan ( ’umn) and Shelah (slh); when she gave birth to the last one, she was in Chezib ( k z y b , 38:3-5). The names o f the brothers are recorded in the tw o valleys o f Wadi ‘Iyar ( ‘yr) and Wadi Nawan (nwn), on the mari­ time slopes o f the Zahran highlands, and the village o f Shawlah (swlh), uphill from these tw o valleys. Chezib, where Shelah was allegedly born, is today a village o f the Zahran lowlands called Abu Qaslb (qsyb, cf. Biblical k zy b ) . 3. Judah had his firstborn, Er, married to Tamar (tmr, 38:6), today Tam ar (tmr), the name o f a mountain pass north o f Taif. 4. Er was a wicked man, and Y ahw eh slew him before Tamar bore him any children. Judah asked his second son, Onan, to have intercourse with Tamar on behalf o f his dead brother, so she would bear offspring to his name; and O nan did so, but his performance was a wilful failure: ‘he ejaculated on the ground, lest he should give offspring to his brother.’ Yahweh was so angered by his refusal to

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raise seed for his brother that he slew him, as he had slain his brother before him (38:8-10). 5. Judah sent Tam ar back to her father’s house, asking her to wait until his youngest son Shelah was old enough to perform the brotherin-law’s duty to her (38:11). 6. Judah became w idow ed before Shelah grew to sexual maturity. O ne day he w ent to Tim nah (tmnh ), where his sheep were being sheared, and Tam ar decided to seize the opportunity to have a child by him, considering that he was her dead husband’s father, whose seed would be the same as the seed o f his son. Dressed and veiled as a harlot, she waited for him at the entrance o f Enaim (‘ynym ), where Judah saw her and ‘went in to her’, making her pregnant. He promised to send her a kid in payment, but she insisted on keeping his signet, his cord and his rod as a pledge. When Judah sent someone back to her with the kid, she could not be found anywhere in Enaim, where Judah had met her (38:12-23). Here it m ust be noted that the Timnah in the story is today Tum na (tmn ’), and Enaim is Ghunnam (gnm ), both villages o f the Taif region. 7. When Judah heard that his daughter-in-law Tam ar was pregnant, he had her brought before him to be burned as a harlot. Before she arrived, however, she had his signet, cord and rod sent to him, with a message saying that the man w ho was the owner o f those objects was the one w ho had made her pregnant. Judah thereupon realized w hat he had done, and he decided to forget the matter. Tam ar subsequently gave birth to tw in boys, Perez (prs) and Zerah (zrh) (38:24-30) — the eponymous ancestors o f the tw o main branches o f the tribe o f Judah. Today, Perez is the name o f the village o f Fardah (prd ), and Zerah that o f the village o f Sarhah (5)7?), both in Wadi Adam. Needless to say, this story is an entertaining legend which summarizes the early alliances and proliferations o f the tribe o f Judah — a tribe which always stood distinct from the other tribes o f Israel. From the topographical identification o f the names in the story, it is clear that it is set not in Asir, but in the southern Hijaz: the Zahran and Taif regions and the valley o f Wadi Adam, where the story o f Jacob the Aramean also takes place. As we have ju st seen, the names o f Judah’s tw o sons by his daughter-in-law — Perez and Zerah — are today those o f tw o villages in Wadi Adam. From other Biblical

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passages, we learn that ‘Bethlehem’ and ‘Ephrathah’ (Micah 5:2) were towns o f the ‘land o f Judah’. Both o f these still exist as villages o f Wadi Adam — U m m Lahm and Furat (see above) — indicating that the original territory o f Judah was centred around Wadi Adam. In the Zahran highlands to the south o f this valley, it appears that the local Judah folk did not survive for long. The story summarized above hints at this where it mentions that Judah’s tw o older sons, Er (Wadi ‘Iyar) and O nan (Wadi Nawan), both died childless at an early age. As for the branch o f the Judah tribe called the Shelah, after Judah’s youngest son by his ow n wife, there is reference to ‘ancient traditions’ concerning them elsewhere in the Bible, where they are described as linen-weavers and potters o f yore (1 Chronicles 4:21-23) — a forgotten humble folk o f the same region, w ho once inhabited places such as ‘Chozeba’ (variant o f ‘Chezib’) and ‘Bethlehem’. Further detailed analysis o f the story is not necessary for our purposes. W hat remains im portant is that its hero, Judah, lived in the same territories o f the southern Hijaz as his alleged forebears Jacob the Aramean, Isaac the Aramean and Abram the Aramean. This means that Judah was an Aramean himself: that is to say, the tribe o f Judah was Aramean in origin, unlike the other tribes o f the later confederation of Israel, which were o f Hebrew stock, claiming descent from Israel o f Hebron. It must have been this significant difference in ethnic origin which kept the Judah separate from the other tribes o f Israel, as is clear from the historical accounts o f the Bible. At this point it would be relevant to recall what I demonstrated in chapter 3, when I analysed the m yth o f the original confusion o f tongues in the composite story o f the T ow er o f Babel and suggested that the setting o f this m yth was the T aif region o f the southern Hijaz. This indicates that m ore than one language was spoken in that part o f West Arabia at some period o f antiquity — including, no doubt, the Aramaic o f the north and the Hebrew o f the south. In the Genesis story o f Jacob the Aramean, as we have seen, his uncle Laban is made to utter w ords in Aramaic; Jacob, on the other hand, is made to utter the same words in Hebrew (31:47). Yet when Jacob went to Paddan-aram, according to the same story, he readily communicated with his Aramean kinsfolk. This implies that he — or rather the Aramean Jacob folk he personifies in the story — were

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bilingual, as are most borderland peoples. By the time the Aramean Judah folk, w ho claimed Jacob the Aramean as an ancestor, had merged with the H ebrew Israelites from the lands further south, their language, most probably, had become mostly Hebrew. Nevertheless, they remembered their Aramean origin, and at least some o f them continued to speak Aramaic as well as H ebrew (see p. 175). It was probably they, among the Israelites, w ho originally confessed before Yahweh, lest they should forget: ‘A wandering Aramean is m y father’ — araml obed abt.

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8 The Search for the H istorical Moses

There was a historical Moses w ho led the exodus o f the Hebrew Israelites from the West Arabian land o f Mizraim in about 1440 BC — according to the Bible (1 Kings 6:1), 480 years before Solomon began building his temple in Jerusalem in about 960 BC. M odern scholars have doubted this date for the exodus, mainly because Egyptian records and archaeological findings in Egypt, Sinai and Palestine do not confirm it. I can think o f no good reason w hy this date should not be correct, considering that it relates, in m y view, to an event which took place entirely in peninsular Arabia, and now here outside Arabia. The dating o f the history o f the Biblical monarchies can be computed, accepting a small margin for error, from a num ber o f synchronisms with Egyptian and M esopotamian history, where the historical material in the Bible refers to Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian or Persian rulers by name. From this, the date 960 B C can be estimated for the com mencement o f the w ork on the construction o f the temple in Jerusalem (which I contend was the original Jerusalem o f West Arabia rather than the one o f Palestine, see The Bible Came from Arabia, pp. 110-123). Adding 480 to this date, we arrive at 1440 B C — the start o f the exodus. Biblical archaeology discovered nothing to justify another date for the event. Yet modern Biblical scholars argue that the Hebrew Israelites m ust have left ‘E gypt’ (the standard identification o f the Biblical ‘M izraim ’) in about 1290, not 1440 BC. By doing so, they inadvertently rob Moses of the distinction o f being the first

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advocate o f monotheism in recorded history, according this honour instead to the Egyptian king Akhenaton (1379-13§2 BC). This has given rise to speculations (one from Sigmund Freud) that the Israelites first became monotheists under an Egyptian influence — speculations which remain entirely unsubstantiated. M ore likely than not, it was the Egyptian king Akhenaton who was influenced by the m onotheism o f the Israelites o f West Arabia, rather than the reverse. There are certainly traces o f his special brand o f monotheism in West Arabia, where the ancient Egyptians maintained colonies for a long time (chapter 6). W hat Akhenaton did was to identify all the gods o f the Egyptian pantheon with his one sun-disc god A ton (itn). T w o clusters o f West Arabian villages, in Wadi Najran and Rijal Alma1, carry construct names which couple the name o f Aton (as Witn, or wtn) with those o f other Egyptian gods: for example, W itn Harshaf (Aton Arsaphes); or Witn Al Harah (Aton Horus). This makes one wonder: is it possible that the identification o f the different Egyptian gods with the sun-disc Aton began as a heresy am ong the ancient Egyptian colonists in West Arabia, under a local monotheistic influence, before this heresy was made the official theology o f Egypt by Akhenaton? Is it for this reason that the construct Aton place names survive in separate clusters in tw o secluded parts o f West Arabia, while they are not found in Egypt, where the m onotheism o f Akhenaton was effectively disestablished almost immediately following his death? As I see it, the career o f the historical Moses preceded that o f the Egyptian king Akhenaton by the better part of a century. His story can be salvaged mainly from the books o f Exodus and N um bers, where it is fused w ith other material, mainly ancient myths. The teachings and discourses attributed to him form the main body o f the books o f Leviticus and Deuteronom y. O f the composition o f these four books and their authorship and redaction, enough has already been said in the Introduction. W hat I propose to do here is to tackle the problem o f the mixed identity o f Moses in the Bible, in an attem pt to discover w ho the historical Moses really was. For a start we m ust establish the special attributes o f the historical Moses, then track him dow n through the book o f Exodus and the book o f N um bers, and the narrative pieces in the book o f Deuteronom y, where his story is fused with other lore about different figures w ho are also called Moses. There was, in fact, more than

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one Moses, as is made clear by a passage o f the book o f Exodus which interrupts the narrative, at a point where it has already become confused, to announce the following (Exodus 6:20, 26-27): A m ram took to wife Jochabed... and she bore him Aaron and M oses... These are the Aaron and Moses (h w ’ ’hrn w-msh) to w hom Yahweh said: ‘Bring out the people o f Israel from the land o f M izraim ...’ It was they w ho spoke to Pharaoh (hm h-mdbrym ’I p r ‘h ), king o f Mizraim, about bringing the people o f Israel out o f Mizraim — this Moses and Aaron (hw ’ msh w -’hrn). W hy should Israelite tradition, at one time, have recognized more than one Moses, so that the book o f Exodus had to hint so broadly at a distinction between this Moses — the one w ho actually led the exodus — and others? The secret may lie in the etym ology o f the name ‘Moses’ (Mosheh, vocalized as the active participle o f msh, ‘draw o u t’; cf. Arabic mas a, ‘retrieve dirt manually from the uterus o f a she-camel, cow, etc.’; Aramaic msha, or ms’, ‘cleanse’). If we turn to Exodus, we find a story which explains how Moses got his name. Pharaoh’s daughter goes to a river to bathe, and there she finds a H ebrew baby in a basket am ong the reeds; so she decides to adopt him and call him Moses, because she ‘drew him o u t’ (msh) o f the water (2:10). Today Biblical scholars doubt this Biblically suggested etymology for the name ‘M oses’. They suggest instead that it is the ancient Egyptian w ord mes (ms), or mesii (msw), meaning ‘child, son’ — from the verb msi, ‘bear, give birth’, which features as a suffix in such Egyptian personal names as Ahmose or Thutmose. I disagree. For once, the etym ology suggested for a name in a Biblical text is correct. ‘M oses’, as the H ebrew Mosheh, means ‘the one w ho draws o u t’: the ‘deliverer’, ‘retriever’, o r ‘redeemer’. In Psalms 18:1617 (as in 2 Samuel 22:17-18), which is the only Biblical text other than Exodus 2:10 where the H ebrew msh is attested as a verb, again meaning ‘draw o u t’, the verb is also equated with the idea o f ‘deliverance’. He drew me out (ymsny, from msh) o f many waters; He delivered me (ysylny) from m y strong enemy... As I see it, ‘M oses’, in the sense o f ‘deliverer’, or better ‘redeemer’,

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was not the actual name o f the man w ho ‘delivered’ or ‘redeem ed’ the H ebrew Israelites from the bondage into which they had fallen in the land o f Mizraim. It was, rather, the honorific title by which he was historically remembered. Before the emergence o f the tribal confederation o f Israel, the Hebrew and Aramean tribes which formed this confederation had claimed different ancestors, all o f w hom were called A bram (’b rm), or ‘exalted father’ (see pp. 93-4). In the text o f Genesis, all these different ‘exalted fathers’ were fused into one Abram, w ho was presented as the common ancestor o f all the Israelites. It also appears that the same Hebrew and Aramean tribes w ho came together to form the confederation o f Israel had originally revered different tribal ‘redeemers’, each o f them, in Hebrew, a Mdsheh, or ‘Moses’. As the book o f Genesis collated the different ‘exalted fathers’ o f these tribes, so the books o f Exodus and N um bers collated their different ‘redeemers’: they were all fused into one Mdsheh , as each o f them in turn was identified with the historical Moses o f the exodus. O ne day, perhaps, someone with monumental patience will unravel the Biblical story o f Moses according to the above suggestion dow n to the last detail. In the meantime I shall limit myself to some cursory observations. The m an fr o m E lo h im The historical Moses w ho led the Hebrew exodus from the land o f Mizraim would probably have come from that place. Let us assume he did. In Exodus 2, such a Moses is presented as the H ebrew boy who grew up in Mizraim in the care o f Pharaoh’s daughter. He is depicted as a man w ho was socially privileged and accustomed to being high-handed: first, he kills an Egyptian w hom he sees beating a Hebrew; second, he tries to impose himself as arbiter in a quarrel between tw o Hebrews (2:11-14). The story indicates to us that Pharaoh sought the death o f Moses because he had killed an Egyptian, so Moses fled to the land o f Midian, where he married a young lady whose father was called Reuel (2:15-21). He returned to Mizraim only after the death o f Pharaoh (2:23), and after ‘all the men who were seeking [his] life’ were dead (4:19). So, it was not only Pharaoh w ho w anted to kill Moses; there were other men too, all o f w hom died after their master. The matter invites close scrutiny, as it clearly involves politics. We shall come back to it. Meanwhile, take note

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o f the Moses w hom the Pharaoh in question and his political supporters had wanted to kill. He is the man we are really after — the historical Moses o f the exodus. From the Mizraim which is today Misramah, near Khamis Mushait in upper Wadi Bishah, the Moses o f Exodus 2 fled to Midian (mdyn ) which is today the village o f Madlnah (mdyn), in Wadi Tathlith, about 100 kilometres east o f Khamis Mushait. Here he married a woman, allegedly Zipporah (2:21), w ho was the daughter o f Reuel (2:18), the priest o f Midian (2:16), and w ho m he first met with her sisters as he was sitting by a well (2:15). In Exodus 3 and 4, a new Moses is introduced into the narrative, whose wife is called Zipporah (4:25) and whose father is. the ‘priest o f M idian’ (3:1), except that the father here has a different name: he is not Reuel, but Jethro (3:1; 4:18). As the father-in-law o f Moses, Reuel now vanishes completely from the scene, giving way to Jethro. He only reappears once again — not in Exodus, but in N um bers 10:29, where he is reintroduced briefly as ‘Reuel the Midianite, Moses’ father-in-law’, with no indication that he was a priest. When som eone’s father-in-law, who is supposed to be the father o f the same wife, suddenly undergoes a change o f name, it is reasonable to suspect that tw o different sets o f persons are being confused. The best way to unravel the mystery is to consider that there is m ore than one Moses in question. For a start, we may safely identify the Moses o f Exodus 3 as the son-in-law o f Jethro (which is initially the only attribute by which he can be distinguished) and follow his person through the composite story. The Moses whose father-in-law was Jethro, priest o f Midian, first appears in Exodus 3:1 as a shepherd in Jeth ro ’s employment, leading his flock across the wilderness from Midian ‘to the mountain o f the gods, towards H o reb’ (my translation o f ’I h r h -’lhym hrbh). Here ‘the angel o f Yahweh appeared to him in a flame o f fire out o f the midst o f a bush’ which ‘was burning, yet it was not consumed’ (3:2). The Hebrew o f the original indicates that ‘H oreb’ (hrb, featuring here in the locative case as hrbh, or ‘towards H o reb’) was simply the general direction in which the ‘mountain o f the gods’ was located in relation to Midian (the Madlnah o f Wadi Tathlith mentioned in Exodus 2), rather than the actual name o f the mountain. In The Bible Came from Arabia, I identified the ‘H oreb’ o f Moses as the present village o f Harib (hrb), at the foot o fjabal Had! on the western slopes o f Asir. As we shall subsequently discover, the historical Moses certainly stopped at

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this particular ‘H oreb’ at one point in his career. The ‘H oreb’ indicated in Exodus 3:1 as in the general direction o f the ‘mountain o f the gods’, however, was a different place. It was either o f the tw o tow ns still called Harib (also hrb) in the Yemen, roughly to the east o f Sanaa, as will be shown below. M ost likely, it was the one closer to Sanaa, called Harib al-Gharamlsh. I suggest this is the case because Moses, according to Exodus (2:22), had a son called Gershom (grsm) — essentially the same name as Gharamish igrms). At this point, the following is to be noted: 1. Horeb, which features as the sacred mountain o f Moses no less than three times in Exodus and nine times in Deuteronom y, is now here actually called Har ha-Eldhim (hr h-’lhym), the ‘mountain o f the gods (not the ‘mountain o f G o d’, as in the usual translations, w hich would be Har Elohim, leaving 'Ihym without the definite article; cf. pp. 33, 87). Apart from the association between the tw o places in Exodus 3:1, which has just been discussed, the only Biblical passage in which the ‘mountain o f the gods’ is actually called Horeb is not in the books o f the Torah, but in 1 Kings 19:8. Here, the tw o places, lying in the same general direction from a given point in Asir, to the north, could have been telescoped into one place. O n the other hand, Har ha-Eldhim, the ‘mountain o f the gods’, is mentioned three m ore times in Exodus in connection with Moses, w ithout being identified or in any way associated w ith Horeb (4:27; 18:5; 24:13). 2. Wherever Jethro the priest o f Midian features in Exodus (and he features nowhere else) in the story o f Moses, Har ha-Elohlm (we m ight call it more simply M ount Elohim) also appears. In 3:1, Moses leads Jethro’s flock to M ount Elohim. In 4:27, Moses has left Jethro in Midian (4:18, 19), and is reportedly on his way back to Mizraim w hen Aaron meets him at M ount Elohim. In 18:5, Jethro pays his son-in-law Moses a visit in his camp at M ount Elohim. 3. In three independent Biblical passages, Moses is spoken o f as Ish ha-Elohim (’ys h-’lhym, Psalms 90:1; Ezra 3:2; 1 Chronicles 23:14). Had he been called here, or anywhere else, ish Elohim (’s ’Ihym), it w ould have meant ‘man o f G od’, as the expression has traditionally been translated. The plain fact, however, is that he is actually called in these passages Ish ha-Eldhim, not Ish Elohim. Taken as an ordinary H ebrew expression, Ish ha-Eldhim w ould not mean ‘man o f G od’, but ‘man o f the gods’ — a singularly inappropriate way to designate

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the man who is probably the first monotheist in recorded history. Perhaps the expression simply means ‘the man o f Elohim ’, to describe a Moses who came from the vicinity o f M ount Elohim. All this would have been mere speculation, had not diverse places called ‘Elohim ’ actually existed in different parts o f peninsular Arabia. In West Arabia, one o f them is the historically attested village of al-Lahlm (7 Ihym, a clear corruption o f ’Ihym), in the Medina region o f the central Hijaz. Another is the present al-Liham (7 Him, also a clear corruption o f ’Ihym), in the T aif region o f the southern Hijaz. The Moses w ho was the ‘man o f Elohim ’ could have come from either place. In northern Yemen, however, some distance west o f the ‘H oreb’ which is the local Harib or Harib al-Ghararmsh (see above), there is a mountain called Jabal Alhan ( ’Ihn), whose name is an Arabicized form o f the Biblical Elohim (’Ihym). In Hebrew, this place would be called Har Elohim, or Har ha-Elohim. It is an inhabited mountain with many villages on its slopes, and a Moses who was a ‘man o f Elohim ’ could easily have come from there. Moreover, Jabal Alhan is located in a highly volcanic part o f Arabia — the region o f Nar al-Yaman, the ‘Fire o f the Y em en’, south-west o f the city o f Sanaa, where volcanoes are well know n to have been active in historical times. It is ju st the sort o f place to come across fires that appeared supernatural because they did not seem to consume their fuel — ‘the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed’. Then, consider the following: 1. In northern Yemen, there is a ‘M idian’ other than the Madlnah o f Wadi Tathlith to which the historical Moses fled from Mizraim, and where he married the daughter o f the man called Reuel. This Yemenite ‘M idian’ is called Maydan (mydtt ), and the Arabic geographical literature notes that it claims a famous historical well. It could have been at this well that the Moses o f Elohim (not the historical Moses), as the story has it, met the daughter o f Jethro o f Maydan (not o f Reuel o f Madlnah), and decided to take her for a wife (see above). 2. In the same part o f northern Yemen, there is a place called Adamah (’dmh ), and another called Qadas (qds). The name o f Adamah, in Hebrew, means ‘soil, ground’. That o f Qadas (as in the Hebrew qodesh, or qds) means ‘holy’; no doubt, the Qadas in question

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must have been, at one time, the site o f a sacred shrine. When Yahweh reportedly called Moses out o f the burning bush at M ount Elohim, he told him: ‘Do not come near; put off your shoes from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is ’dmt qds’ (traditionally taken to mean ‘holy ground’). The expression for ‘holy ground’ in H ebrew would actually be ’dmh qdsh, not ’dmt qds, which is a construct o f tw o nouns, not a noun followed by an adjective. The construct can mean ‘the ground o f holiness’. M ore readily, however, it w ould mean ‘the ground o f Qadas’; even better, ‘the Adamah o f Qadas’ (Arabic Adamat Qadas ; or ’dmt qds). What is indicated is not the abstract concept o f ‘holy ground’, but the particular sanctity o f the actual site o f Qadas, or o f the Adamah o f Qadas, near Jabal Alhan, in the northern Yemen. 3. Again in the same area o f the Yemen, there is a large village called Milyan (mlyn). According to Exodus 4:24, Moses, on his way from Midian (4:19) to M ount Elohim (4:27), passed or stopped at w hat Biblical translations take to have been a ‘lodging place’ (mlu>n, traditionally vocalized malon) (RSV). As a term, mlwn in Hebrew can mean a ‘lodging place’. Here, however, it seems to be none other than the present village o f Milyan, in the Yemen, between Maydan, or ‘M idian’, and Jabal Alhan, or ‘M ount Elohim ’. In Exodus 3 and 4, as elsewhere, the story o f Moses o f Elohim is fused at every step with the story o f the historical Moses o f Mizraim. When Yahweh spoke to Moses o f Elohim out o f the burning bush at M ount Elohim, in w hat I take to be the original version o f this story, he said nothing to him about the deliverance o f the people o f Israel from their affliction and sufferings in Mizraim (the interpolated passages in 3:7-12, 16-22; 4: If.). All he did was to introduce him self by name (3:14), saying ‘Ehyeh is what I am ’ (’hyh ’sr ’hyh) (traditionally taken to mean ‘I am what I am ’), and distinctly asking to be called Ehyeh (’hyh). This Ehyeh, rather than being the ordinary Hebrew for ‘I am ’ was apparently a local, South Arabian variant o f the name o f Yahweh (yhwh), surviving to this day as the name o f the village o f Hiyay (hyy), in the southernmost parts o f the Asir highlands, close to the present Yemen border. The response o f Moses o f Elohim to Yahweh, when he called him out o f the ‘burning bush’ at Jabal Alhan, must have been negative, for the ‘anger’ o f Yahweh was reportedly ‘kindled’ against him forthwith (4:14). Then,

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as the Moses o f the same story was travelling between Midian (Maydan) and M ount Elohim (Jabal Alhan), something very strange happened to him at Malon (Milyan) (4:24-26): O n the way, at Malon, Yahweh met him and sought to kill him. Then Zipporah took a flint and cut off her son’s foreskin, and reached to his feet (w-tg‘ l-rglyw) and said: ‘Surely then, you are a bridegroom o f tw o bloods (htn dmym ) to m e.’ So he let him alone. Then it was that she said: ‘You are m y bridegroom o f tw o bloods (htn dmym) for circumcisions (l-mlwt ).’ Does this story make any sense in the context o f the career o f historical, human and rational Moses? As I see it, the story is pure mythology, in which not just Yahweh, but all the characters are gods. The m yth involved, which is related to the rite o f circumcision, is not unlike that o f the A bram o f Genesis 15 (chapter 4). Moses of Elohim was apparently a ‘redeemer’ god o f some ancient South Arabian mystery cult, and Zipporah, originally his virgin mother rather than his wife, was also a goddess. As in other mystery cults o f the ancient Near East, the consort o f a god can be his m other or sister w ho subsequently becomes his wife. In Christianity, the Virgin M ary is miraculously fertilized by God, so that she becomes essentially the wife o f God, and also the m other o f God (as the man Jesus) at the same time. At one time, it appears, the cult o f the ‘redeemer’ Moses and his virgin m other Zipporah was not unlike that o f Jesus and his virgin m other Mary, before it was suppressed and absorbed into the cult o f Yahweh. In the story we have salvaged out o f the confused text o f Exodus 3 and 4, Yahweh calls to the god Moses out o f a volcano at M ount Elohim and apparently demands from him the surrender o f his divinity, which he refuses. So the anger o f Yahweh is kindled against him, and he seeks to kill him. Thereupon his virgin m other Zipporah intervenes to allay the w rath o f Yahweh by sacrificing to him the foreskin o f the recalcitrant ‘redeemer’ god w ho is her son. Having done this, she then crawls to her son’s feet and recognizes him as

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her ‘bridegroom ’, by virtue o f the blood o f his circumcision which she had personally performed, and which is the allegorical equivalent o f the blood o f her bridal hym en (hence the term dmym in the myth, w hich makes the best sense in context as the dual rather than the plural o f dm, ‘blood’). Having lost her hym en and become an ordinary ‘bride’, Zipporah ceases to be a goddess. Likewise, having lost his foreskin and become an ordinary ‘bridegroom ’, Moses o f Elohim ceases to be a god. So Yahweh leaves the two o f them in peace. From being a god in his ow n right, Moses is now reduced to an agent o f Yahweh. It is as an ordinary mortal, an agent o f Yahweh, that his character comes to be fused w ith that o f the historical Moses in the text o f Exodus. As usual, topographical evidence from West Arabia exists to underline the Biblical myth. In the same highlands o f Asir, by the borders o f the Yemen, where the name o f Yahweh survives in the village o f Hiyay, there is another village, close by, called al-Mush (7m w s), the ‘god Moses’, not to mention a number o f other villages called al-Musa or A1 Musa (7 muss’, also the ‘god Moses’) in regions further to the north. In the same vicinity as al-Mush there is the village o f A1 D am m am (7 dmm, cf. H ebrew dmym), indicating a ‘god o f two bloods’; also the village o f A1 Maylah (7 mylh, cf. Hebrew mwlh, ‘circumcision’), whose name stands for a ‘god o f circumcision’. N ot far to the south-east, in the valley o f Wadi Najran, the village o f A1 Zafirah (’I zprh) still carries the name o f the ‘goddess Z ipporah’ (Biblical sprh). The conjunction o f these topographical names in the same area cannot be pure coincidence. Moreover, uncanny as it may seem, it is possible to fix in the Y em en the exact site o f the m yth o f the circumcision o f the god Moses, and the loss o f his virginity to the goddess who had formerly been his virgin mother. It is the village called to this day Qulfat al-‘U dhr: literally, the ‘foreskin o f virginity’, also meaning the ‘foreskin o f circumcision’. You can find the site and read the name for yourself on the Bartholomew World Travel Map o f the Arabian peninsula. It is located along the main road between Sanaa and Saadah. Moses o f Elohim appears once again in the tangled text o f Exodus (24:13, 15-18), where a M ount Sinai (hr syny) is mentioned side by side w ith M ount Elohim (hr h-’lhym). The M ount Sinai in question could not have been in the Egyptian Sinai peninsula, because this Sinai is not volcanic, whereas the M ount Sinai o f Exodus definitely

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was (see below). N o doubt it was the mountain ridge at the upper reaches o f Wadi Sayan (syn), in the northern Yemen, at Jabal Alhan or M ount Elohim. Here is what happened: Moses rose up... and Moses w ent up into M ount E lohim ... Moses w ent up into the mountain, and a cloud covered the mountain. The glory o f Yahweh settled on M ount Sinai, and the cloud covered it six days; and on the seventh day he called to Moses out o f the midst o f the cloud. N o w the appearance o f the glory o f Yahweh was as a devouring fire on top o f the m ountain... Moses entered the cloud, and w ent up on the mountain; and Moses was on the mountain forty days and forty nights. It appears that Yahweh, at least according to one tradition, was originally the god o f the volcanic fire o f N ar al-Yaman. Here is another account o f him as a volcanic phenom enon in Exodus (excerpted from 19:10-20): Yahweh said to Moses: ‘Go to the people and sanctify them today and tom o rrow ... for on the third day Yahweh will come dow n in the sight o f all the people on M o unt Sinai. You shall set bounds to the people round about... for w hoever touches the mountain shall be put to death. N o hand will touch him; but he will surely be stoned or shot through. W hether beast or man, it shall not live.... ’ And on the third day, in the m orning, there were thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud on the m ountain__M ount Sinai was all in smoke, because Yahweh had descended on it in fire; and its smoke rose as the smoke o f a furnace, and the whole mountain quaked greatly.... Yahweh came dow n on M ount Sinai, on the top o f the m ountain__ From another passage in Exodus (24:10), w e learn that the volcano god Yahweh, the ‘devouring fire on top o f the m ountain’, was actually represented there by an idol: ‘under its feet, as it were, a

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paved w ork o f sapphire stone, as clear as the sky’. When the local volcano was quiet and the site was approachable, the privileged initiates o f the Yahweh cult could visit the idol, ‘see’ this god (24:10) w ithout being harmed, and even ‘eat and drink’ in his presence (24:11). Once he had ceased to be a god in his ow n right, Moses o f Elohim came to be recognized as the ‘redeemer’ o f his people from the unpredictable and destructive w rath o f Yahweh. As the ‘man o f Elohim ’, he reportedly persuaded Yahweh, with w hom he alone could speak ‘face to face’ (33:11), to abandon his original hom e in the terrible volcanic crater at Jabal Alhan and establish a residence for him self am ong his followers. According to Exodus (25:8 - 27:19), Yahweh agreed to this, provided a special ‘sanctuary’ — a ‘tabernacle’ — was reserved for him outside the m ain encampment o f the people, w ith a special retinue o f priests to guard him. To his new sanctuary am ong his folk, however, Yahweh brought his special ‘sign’ to recall his volcanic past. It was the ‘pillar o f sm oke’ which always stood at the entrance to the ‘tabernacle’ (33:9-10). Could it be that Moses, the ‘man o f Elohim’, was originally a high priest o f the cult o f the volcano god Yahweh in the northern Yemen, w ho came to be recognized for some time by a heresy o f that cult as a ‘redeemer’ god in his ow n right? This could well have been the case, considering that Jethro, the alleged father o f his consort Zipporah, was a priest — perhaps his mentor in the Yahweh cult. From Exodus 34:33-35, we learn that Moses used to wear a veil to cover his face from the people, and only remove his veil w hen alone in the presence o f Yahweh. According to the Arab historians o f early Islamic times, some o f the high priests o f Arabia before Islam were regularly veiled. A m ong them was the high priest o f Yamamah, Maslamah Ibn Habib, better rem embered as Musaylamah, w ho was a contemporary o f the prophet M uham m ad. He definitely covered his face w ith a veil, as Moses o f Elohim reportedly did in his ow n time. In the book o f Psalms there is the text o f a prayer (tplh ) attributed to ‘Moses the man o f Elohim ’ (Psalm 90) which could well have been his ow n w ork, or one composed at an early time in the highlands o f the northern Yemen, where the worship o f Yahweh as a local volcano ’/, or ‘god’, had originated:

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Lord, you have been a support (m ‘wn) to us from generation to generation. Before the mountains were born, or you had formed the earth and the world — from ever and for ever you are a god (’th 7). You turn people to dust and say: ‘Return, O mankind!’ For a thousand years in your eyes are as yesterday that passes, and as a watch in the night... Who knows the pow er o f your anger? Y our wrath is as your awe. Teach us, therefore, to keep count o f our days, that we may become wise... The son o f A m ram We shall leave Moses o f Elohim at this point and turn to another Moses, the ‘son’ o f A m ram and the ‘brother’ o f Aaron w ho, contrary to the claim made in Exodus 6:26-27 (see above) was certainly not the historical Moses w ho redeemed the H ebrew Israelites from their bondage in Mizraim. According to N um bers 26:59, this Moses also had a sister called Miriam. The same M iriam is referred to in Exodus 15:20 as a ‘prophetess’ and a sister o f Aaron, w ith no mention o f Moses as her brother. While the Moses o f Elohim represents a South Arabian tradition and belongs in the Yemen, the Moses wTho was the ‘son’ o f A m ram and the ‘brother’ o f Aaron and Miriam, was a Moses o f the T aif and Zahran regions o f the Hijaz — the homeland o f Abram the Aramean and his alleged descendants w ho were Isaac, Jacob and Judah. M ost probably, he was originally revered there as a ‘redeemer’ by the local Aramean folk w ho later joined the confederation o f Israel. The topographical survival o f his ow n name in that territory, along w ith that o f his ‘father’, his ‘brother’ and his ‘sister’, suggests that all four o f them were originally gods: 1. A m ram (‘mrm , Koranic ‘U m ran, or ' m m ): Al ‘A m rin (7 ‘mm, the ‘god’ ‘mrn), the name o f tw o villages in the T aif region. 2. Aaron (Tira): the village o f H awran (hwrn), on the maritime slopes o f the Zahran region. 3. Miriam (mrym ): the village o f Al M aryam (7 mrym, the ‘goddess

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M iriam ’), near Hawran, or ‘Aaron’, in the same valley o f the Zahran region. 4. Moses (msh): the village o f al-Musa (7 m w s\ the ‘god Moses’, w ith the regular Arabic form o f the name), in the Zahran highlands, uphill from Hawran and A1 Maryam. In the Biblical story o f Moses, Aaron is introduced at every stage, and M iriam at some stages, with the purpose o f identifying their ‘bro ther’, Moses son o f Amram, with the historical Moses o f Mizraim. Where Exodus starts to relate the story o f the historical Moses, his father and mother are left unnamed (2:1). There is a brief reference to the fact that he had an older ‘sister’ (2:4, 7), w ho could have been merely a ‘kinsw om an’ (the w ord in Hebrew is the same); but she is also left unnamed. O n the other hand, no mention is made o f a ‘b rother’. It is only in Exodus 4:14 that Aaron is first introduced as the ‘brother’ o f Moses, who was to serve as his ‘m outh’ and speak for him, as Moses him self was reportedly ‘not eloquent’, and ‘slow o f speech and tongue’ (4:1 Of.). At this point in the Exodus narrative, the historical Moses is already confused with Moses o f Elohim and Moses the son o f Amram, both o f w hom were gods. In gnostic religions it is not uncom m on to distinguish between the silent god, w hose existence can only be inferred, and a subordinate speaking god, in whose person the transcendental reality o f the silent god becomes manifest. In Islam there are esoteric sects which to this day distinguish between ‘silent’ prophets, o f w hom Moses is considered the prototype, and ‘speaking’ prophets, o f w hom the prototype is taken to be Aaron. In West Arabia, this distinction between ‘silent’ and ‘speaking’ gods or prophets m ust have been a gnostic concept o f im memorial antiquity. There were actually tw o Aarons, not one, who came to be identified in the H ebrew Bible as the ‘brother’ o f the historical Moses. First, the Aaron w ho died on the top o f M ount H or (hr h-hr, N um bers 20:23f.), today Jabal Harrah (hr) in the Zahran highlands. Second, the Aaron w ho died in Moserah (mwsrh), near the ‘wells o f the people o f Jaakan’ (b’rt bny y ‘qn, D euteronom y 10:6) — today Maysiriyyah (mysryh), near Wujay'an (wgy'n), in the Qasim region north-east o f Taif. The fact that there was more than one Aaron is implied in Exodus 6:26-27 (see above) which does not only specify lthis Moses’,

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but also ‘this A aron’, to distinguish them from others. Here are some interesting details to consider: in the Biblical story o f the exodus as it stands, Aaron, as one person, is depicted as the second-in-command to the historical Moses and also as the founder o f the Israelite priesthood. He comports him self throughout with a sacerdotal dignity befitting his high priestly status, except on one occasion, when he reportedly yields to popular pressure in the temporary absence o f Moses, and fashions a golden calf, summoning the people o f Israel to worship it (Exodus 32:1-35). In Deuteronom y 10:6, it is said that w hen Aaron died at Moserah, or Maysiriyyah in the Qasim region, he was buried there, and his son Eleazer succeeded him as priest. The Aaron w ho died there m ust have been Aaron the priest, and it was he, not the one w ho died on M ount Hor, w ho was mourned ‘by all the house o f Israel’ for thirty days (Numbers 20:29, see below). This Aaron had never fashioned a golden calf for the people o f Israel to worship: it was not in his character to do so. The Aaron w ho died on M ount H o r must have been the recalcitrant one w ho seized the opportunity o f the absence o f Moses to order the worship o f the golden calf. O f this Aaron, and o f his equally recalcitrant ‘sister’ Miriam, the following story is told (Numbers 12:1-15): M iriam and Aaron criticize Moses for having married a ‘Cushite w om an’ (none other than the daughter o f Reuel o f Midian, see below). Thereupon Yahweh summons them, upbraids them strongly for having ‘done foolishly’ and ‘sinned’, and punishes Miriam by striking her with leprosy. Aaron pleads w ith Moses for leniency to his sister, but to no avail. As a leper, M iriam is ‘shut up outside the camp seven days’. We are told subsequently that she died and was buried, but no public m ourning over her death is reported (Numbers 20:1). Aaron, like Miriam, was punished for his ‘foolishness’ and ‘sin’ in due time. U pon the com mand o f Yahweh, who denounced him as a rebel (Numbers 20:24), he was seized by Moses and led up to the top o f M ount H or (Jabal Harrah, in the Zahran highlands) in the sight o f all the people o f Israel. There Moses had him stripped o f his garments, after which ‘he died’ (20:23-28). There is no mention o f his having been buried. When people are stripped o f their clothes, they do not automatically die. I would say Moses put the rebel Aaron to death and left his body to rot unburied on the top o f M ount Hor.

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The Aaron who met such a violent and ignominious end could hardly have been the dignified priest w ho was mourned by ‘all the house o f Israel’ for thirty days (20:29). The book o f N um bers simply confuses him with the priest w ho happened to be his namesake. W ho was he then? Who was his ‘sister’ Miriam? And w hat was the real ‘sin’ for which both o f them received such terrible punishments? M y guess is that the offspring o f A m ram — Aaron, M iriam and the Moses who was their ‘brother’ — were originally central figures in related cults which rivalled the cult o f Yahweh among the Aramean folk o f the Taif and Zahran regions o f the southern Hijaz. In the cult o f Aaron the deity was worshipped as a golden calf. In time, the cult o f Moses, among the three, was somehow absorbed into the cult o f Yahweh, which ultimately facilitated the Biblical identification o f this Moses w ith the historical Moses o f the exodus. The outcome was a clash between the cult o f Moses, in association with that o f Yahweh, on the one hand, and those o f Aaron and Miriam, w ho refused to be absorbed into the cult o f Yahweh, on the other. This ancient clash between rival religious cults o f the southern Hijaz was telescoped by the local folk mem ory into a myth, which was later edited and fused into the Biblical story o f the historical Moses. In the original myth, Aaron and Miriam did not criticize their ‘brother’ Moses for marrying a ‘Cushite w om an’. They must have criticized him for something far m ore serious: yielding his divinity so readily to Yahweh. This, I w ould suggest, was their grievous ‘foolishness’ and ‘sin’, for which M iriam was punished w ith leprosy and ostracism, and died unm ourned, and for which her ‘broth er’ Aaron was stripped naked on top o f M ount Hor and put to death. In N um bers 33:38, we are told that Aaron died on M ount H or on the first day o f the fifth m onth o f the fortieth year o f the exodus o f the people o f Israel from the land o f Mizraim. Such accuracy in dating can only relate to a historical event. To m y mind, however, this was not the date o f the execution o f the mythical Aaron on M ount H or. Rather, it was that o f the death o f the historical Aaron at M oserah — the priest w ho was the associate o f the historical Moses, w ithout necessarily being his actual brother. O r was he an independent historical figure w hose person somehow came to be associated in legend with the figure o f the historical Moses? The truth o f this matter is difficult to establish.

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The historical Moses Moses the man o f Elohim and Moses the son o f A m ram were probably h o t the only tribal ‘redeemers’ whose m ythology is fused in the Bible with the story o f the historical Moses. With an effort, one may be able to discover others and detect, in detail, how the fusion was made. In the meantime let us turn to the historical Moses. Who was he? H ow can we ascertain his historicity? The historical Moses was born in the land o f Mizraim, possibly in the city itself (Exodus 2: If.). He was o f undetermined Hebrew parentage and was apparently brought up as an Egyptian o f high status (2:10); he also seems to have retained a strong sense o f his H ebrew ethnicity (2:11-12). The indications are that in time he came to be deeply involved in the politics o f the Egyptian colony o f Mizraim. O n one occasion the Pharaoh in pow er and a large faction sought the young m an’s death for political reasons, forcing him to take flight. He was only able to return to Mizraim w hen this particular Pharaoh, his mortal enemy, ‘died’, and a new Pharaoh took over. I would say that the former Pharaoh did not die a natural death, but was overthrow n and killed, after which his partisans were seized and executed: how else could ‘all the m en’ w ho were seeking the life o f Moses (4:19) have died at the same time? During his exile Moses stayed in the ‘M idian’ which is today Madlnah, in Wadi Tathlith, at a safe distance, but close enough to be able to watch the political developments in Mizraim. He married the daughter o f a local notable called Reuel. She appears to have been his only wife. H er brother Hobab, properly identified as the son o f Reuel o f Midian, is introduced as the brother-in-law o f Moses at w hat must have been a much later stage in his career (Numbers 10:29-33). Originally, Reuel, the father-in-law, had come from Kuthah ( k w t , cf. kws, Biblical ‘C ush’), near Mizraim, in upper Wadi Bishah, close by Khamis Mushait. This explains w hy his daughter, as the wife o f Moses, is described as a ‘Cushite w om an’ in N um bers 12:1. That this ‘Cushite w om an ’ was none other than the daughter o f Reuel o f Midian is implicit from the recognition o f Reuel’s son Hobab in the text o f N umbers, as the brother-in-law o f Moses, shortly before the ‘Cushite w om an’ is spoken o f as his wife. I very much doubt that this w om an, like the consort o f Moses o f Elohim, was called Zipporah (see above); yet the coincidence cannot be entirely ruled out.

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Moses, though a Hebrew, was a man of political prominence in Mizraim, as is clear from his behaviour after his return from Midian. He had ready access to Pharaoh, spoke freely in his presence, bargained with him from a position o f power, and used strong language in his presence with im punity (Exodus, chapters 4-11 passim). He even had the privilege o f walking out from interviews with Pharaoh ‘in hot anger’ (b-hry ’p, 11:8). Bearing in mind that Pharaoh was the ruler o f the Egyptian colony o f Mizraim, and that Moses was a politically privileged and ambitious H ebrew whose people lived in that colony under Pharaoh’s rule, w hat were the arguments between the tw o men actually about? After the setback he had experienced under the preceding Pharaoh, which had forced him to go into temporary exile in Midian, Moses, it seems, had been turning more and more to his ow n Hebrew folk in the territory o f Mizraim for political support. Because he was o f H ebrew origin, his chances for political advancement in Mizraim were limited. The best he could hope for was to become the second man in the colony after the Egyptian Pharaoh. So he decided to lead his Hebrew folk out o f the land o f Mizraim to establish a new political com m unity elsewhere which would be Hebrew, not Egyptian, and o f which he w ould be the independent ruler. Pharaoh m ight have opposed the idea in principle, for fear that his territory m ight in consequence become critically underpopulated. As I see it, however, Pharaoh was also concerned about the direction in which the Hebrews, under the leadership o f Moses, proposed to go. The retranslation o f a few passages from Exodus, in the light o f the topography o f West Arabia, illustrates this with the utm ost clarity: 1. In the accepted translations, Yahweh says to Moses in Exodus 3:19 (AV): ‘I am sure that the king o f Egypt (Mizraim) will not let you go, no, not by a mighty hand (w-l’ b-yd hzqh).’ Here yd hzqh (vocalized yad hazaqah) does not mean ‘mighty hand’. Rather, it indicates the ‘valley (Hebrew yd, Arabic wadi, or wd) o f Hazaqah’. The reference here is to the valley o f Wadi Habuna, north o f Wadi Najran, where a village called Hazqah (exactly hzqh) is still to be found. The village must originally have given this valley its name. The valley in question is one o f the main natural outlets from the southern highlands o f Asir into the Yamamah — a stretch o f oases in the Arabian interior bordering the plateau o f Najd from the south.

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A Hebrew com m unity established in Yamamah, in Central Arabia, would have been in a position to control the main caravan route between East and West Arabia, and so gain a stranglehold over the trans-Arabian trade o f the Egyptian colony in Mizraim. It m ust be noted that the H ebrew yad is recognized by scholars as being the equivalent o f the Arabic wadi , or ‘valley’, in addition to meaning ‘hand’ (Arabic yad). I would translate the H ebrew w -l’ b-yd hzqh to mean ‘not even by Wadi H azqah’. There are outlets from the Asir highlands into Central Arabia other than Wadi Habuna which are actually more direct (see below). 2. For Exodus 6:26, the accepted translations say: ‘These are the Aaron and Moses to w h om the Lord (i.e. Yahweh) said, “Bring out the people o f Israel from the land o f Egypt (Mizraim) by their hosts (7 sb’tm)”'( RSV). To begin with, the H ebrew preposition 7 means ‘on, over, above, on to’, but not ‘b y ’, which in H ebrew w ould be b. As for sb’tm (traditionally vocalized slb’othdm), which can mean ‘their hosts’, it appears to me to indicate the oasis in Central Arabia, north o f the Yamamah valley, know n today as Dabatayn (dbtyn). What is suggested is a m ore direct outlet from Wadi Bishah to Central Arabia by way o f Wadi al-Dawasir north o f Wadi Habuna (see above). M y translation here: ‘Bring out the people o f Israel from the land o f Mizraim on to Dabatayn (7 sb’tm ) ' 3. In the accepted translation o f Exodus 13:17-18 (RSV), we are told: ‘When Pharaoh let the people go, God did not lead them by way o f the land o f the Philistines (’rs plstym), although that was near... But God led the people round by way o f the wilderness toward the Red Sea (ym swp). And the people o f Israel w ent up out o f the land o f Egypt (Mizraim) equipped for battle (w-hmsym ‘lw bny ysr’l m -’rs msrym).’ Here hmsym (traditionally vocalized hamushim) has been taken to mean ‘equipped for battle’. I am convinced it refers to what is today Khamasln (exactly hmsyn ), the principal village o f Wadi al-Dawasir (see above), which leads directly from inland Asir to the Yamamah and other parts o f Central Arabia. Therefore I would retranslate the sentence: ‘And the people o f Israel w ent up to Khamasln from the land o f M izraim’. The Israelites, apparently warned against proceeding directly from there to Central Arabia, could have turned southwards to the ‘valley o f Hazqah’ (yd hzqh), today Wadi Habuna (see above), close by the desert o f Bahr Safi, (sp\ Biblical swp): literally, in Arabic, the ‘sea o f Safi’ (cf. Hebrew

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The Search fo r the Historical Moses ym swp, vocalized Yam Suf). A Lebanese secondary school teacher was the first to draw my attention to the fact that the Biblical Yam S u f could only have been the Arabian Bahr Safi. The pastoral fringes o f the desert there are still called Bilad Y am (exactly, ym, a com m on

Semitic w ord for ‘sea’). Geologically, the area there abounds in ancient lake deposits, which is not surprising. All the valleys o f the inland Yemen and Asir drain into it. 4. In connection with the same passage of Exodus, there remains the question o f the ‘way o f the land o f the Philistines’ (Ark ’rsplstym), which the Israelites avoided taking in their exodus from the land o f Mizraim, although it was ‘near’ (qrwb). The ‘Philistines’ (plstym) were the people o f Falsah (pish), a village o f the Asir highlands flanking Wadi Bishah from the west. By going out from the land o f Mizraim through this Falsah, the Israelites would have proceeded northw ards to reach the southern Hijaz, which is where Pharaoh actually wanted them to go. Moses, however, wanted to take them to Central Arabia instead, so he diverted from that road and headed eastwards for Khamasin. The Egyptians must have blocked the way and forced the Israelites to m ove southwards from Khamasin in the direction o f Wadi Habuna, where an Egyptian force was also lying in wait, as we shall ultimately see. 5. In Exodus 14:8, we are told that the people o f Israel were pursued by Pharaoh as they w ent b-yd rmh, traditionally take to mean ‘w ith a high hand’ (AV), i.e. ‘defiantly’. Actually, Moses had first led the Israelites out o f the land o f Goshen to Succoth (12:37). In analysing the story o f Joseph (chapter 6), we have already noted that Goshen is the present Ghithan, in the Balqarn hill country o f northern Asir, flanking the lower course o f Wadi Bishah from the west. As for Succoth (skt) it is today the village o f A1 Skut (exactly skt), a short distance to the south o f Ghithan, or ‘Goshen’. From this ‘Succoth’ the Israelites proceeded to nearby Rimah (rmh). Having arrived there, they turned eastwards, heading towards Khamasin in Wadi al-Dawasir, by way o f the ‘valley o f Rimah’ (b-yd rmh). There is actual geography rather than a ‘high hand’ or ‘defiance’ in question. The Egyptians, clearly, did not wish to see Moses establish a strong Hebrew community in the Yamam ah and the adjacent parts o f Central Arabia, where these Hebrews would have controlled the immediate hinterland o f Mizraim. They preferred the Hebrews to

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go elsewhere to the north, far from Mizraim, where they would be kept at a safe distance. The bargaining between Pharaoh and Moses was over this issue. It was finally agreed that the Hebrews would go northwards, but they remained determined to attempt the forbidden exit into Central Arabia. Thus, having gathered themselves in Al Skut, the Biblical ‘Succoth’, in the hill country west o f Wadi Bishah, they moved dow n Wadi Rlmah (Biblical yd rmh) to the point o f its confluence with Wadi Bishah, and from there headed eastwards to the village o f Khamasln, which overlooks Wadi al-Dawasir, hoping to make a direct exit into the Y am am ah region from there. Stopped by the Egyptians at that strategic point, they m oved south to attempt another exit from Wadi Habuna, where they encamped ‘above Z ephon’ (b-‘l spn, not b‘l spn, or ‘Baal-zephon’, as the expression is usually rendered, 14:2). The place indicated is today still called Safan (exactly spn) — a village adjacent to Wadi Habuna from the south. As the awaiting Egyptian forces moved dow n into the valley to block the H ebrew access into the Yamamah, they were reportedly destroyed and washed away into the wastes o f Yam S u f — not the ‘Red Sea’, but the desert o f Bahr Safi — by the waters o f w hat could only have been an unexpected flash flood (14:20-30). To appreciate the effect o f flood in the area, here is a report about the one which occurred in 1918 in Wadi Tathlith, not far from Wadi Habuna (Fuad Hamza, FT Bilad ‘AsTr, Riyadh, 1951, p. 146): In 1918, there was a great flood in Wadi Tathlith. It broke through the sand dunes which separate it from Wadi al-Dawasir at Makhtamiyyah, and overwhelm ed Wadi al-Dawasir, washing away many o f its villages... The flood continued for days, irresistible. The place where it broke through the sand dunes came to be called the Burst o f M akhtamiyyah. A much smaller flood in Wadi Habuna would have sufficed to wash away Pharaoh and his forces to the wastes o f Bahr Safi, leaving the bodies o f the Egyptians lying dead on the edges o f the desert after the flood waters had receded (14:30). It is, in fact, the perfect geographical accuracy o f the trek o f the H ebrew exodus from Mizraim, w hen followed on the map o f Arabia, that establishes the historicity o f the exodus, and o f its leader Moses, beyond the shadow o f a doubt. Between E gypt and Palestine, this

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trek cannot be followed at all; for this reason, there are a num ber o f theories about it, some o f which doubt that a Hebrew exodus on the scale described in the Bible ever took place. In Arabia, however, this exodus — starting not from ‘E g ypt’, but from the Egyptian colony o f Mizraim in Wadi Bishah — can be followed stage by stage (see map p. 140). H ow ever I shall spare the reader its reconstruction in this chapter (for the full details, see the Appendix). What remains im portant is this: there was a historical Moses; there is much accurate information about him in the Bible with its authenticity beyond question; and this information can be salvaged from the maze o f legendary and mythical lore w ith which it is fused. Perhaps, one day, we may have a proper biography o f Moses, which his towering stature in world history more than deserves.

9 The Man Who Saw It Happen

In the preceding chapters, we have re-examined the content o f the m ore im portant Torah stories — as myth, legend or history — against the geographical background o f Arabia, on the assumption that they are actually Arabian lore. In the chapter that follows, we shall turn from the Torah to consider the Biblical story o f Jonah in the same light. Before doing so, it would be useful to stop and make a sum m ary inventory o f what we have learned so far, and assess the degree to which our experiment has been successful. T h e pagan origins o f Judaism It has long been accepted that Yahweh, the One God o f the Hebrew Bible, was originally a tribal god am ong many. From our experiment w ith the Torah stories which speak o f him, we have gathered a rich harvest o f information about the pantheon to which he originally belonged, and the colourful mythology with which he was connected in ancient Arabia. Here, at one time, every conceivable notion, no m atter how abstract, appears to have been represented by a god or goddess, to w hom different powers and functions were assigned. T o begin with there was a wide array o f nature deities: Al Sadi (Biblical El Shaddai), a mountain god; Al ‘Alyan (Biblical El Elyon), a god o f elevations or mountain country; Al Sarah (Biblical Sarah), a goddess o f the Asir highlands, at first barren, until she is made fertile by Abu Ruhm (Biblical Abraham), the god o f drizzling rain and dry-farming. The product o f the marriage between Al Sarah and Abu Ruhm is Isaac (Arabic Dahhak, the ‘overflowing one’) as

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a god o f wells, and hence o f irrigation. In the mythology o f ancient Arabia, this potent god o f wells, by whose ‘thigh’ (or phallus) people swore, marries Rebekkah, a goddess o f fecundity and feminine guile, who bears him tw in sons, both o f them gods o f male fertility: Al ‘Isa (Biblical Esau), a rugged god o f unbridled male promiscuity; and Al ‘U qbah (Jacob), a smooth god o f domesticated masculinity, and hence o f regular progeny and family life. Al ‘Isa is the firstborn o f the twins, but Al ‘U qbah, acting under his m other’s guidance, tricks him out o f his birthright, thereby establishing the trium ph o f domestic sex over the ‘firstborn’, or m ore archaic, urge o f sexual licence. With Al ‘Isa and Al ‘Uqbah, we are already moving from the realm o f nature gods to that o f gods o f concepts. Here the ancient Arabian pantheon had countless deities. Al Hayat, for example, was a god o f the abstract concept o f life, represented in the Garden o f Eden (Junaynah, in Wadi Bishah) by the Tree o f Life. Al H aYYah (Biblical Eve), on the other hand, was a goddess o f motherhood, and hence o f ‘all living creatures’ or actual life. At the same time, we have Al Bashar, the god o f live flesh, whose vegetarian cult forbade the eating o f meat. There was the god o f ethical knowledge, Al D a‘ya, represented in the garden o f Eden by the Tree of Knowledge. His associate and link w ith the human w orld was the serpent god Al Hamshah, standing for the related but m ore practical concepts o f w isdom, cleverness and wiliness. Gods were also recognized as representing diverse aspects of human society and social institutions. Al N aylh (Biblical Noah) was a god o f hum an settlements. His chief ally was Al Thabit, the god of stability, w ho guaranteed the continuity and regularity o f settled com m unity life. Al Naylh, however, had another ally: the rainbow god Al Qays, w ho guaranteed the regularity o f the seasons, his main functions being to tame the ferocity o f the cloud god Al ‘Inan, who could devastate human settlements w ith torrential floods. Al ShafT, also called Al Lisan, was a god o f unified speech w ho promoted understanding and co-operation am ong people. His natural adversary was Al Balal, the polyglot god o f misunderstanding and confusion. While Al Lisan strove hard to bring people together and keep them unified, Al Balal strove equally hard to disperse them, destroy their unity, and divide them into different nations, speaking different tongues.

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Yet other gods were Al Ruyah (Biblical El Roi), the god o f seeing; Al Sham‘ah (Biblical Ishmael), the god o f hearing; Al Yusif (Biblical Joseph), also called Al YazTd, a god o f increase and worldly success, conceived o f as being a son o f the fertility god Al ‘U qbah (Jacob). Al Baram (the A bram o f Genesis 15) was a god o f male continence and virgin sterility, w hose sexual potency could only be unleashed by circumcision. Al Maylah obligingly served as a god o f circumcision for this purpose, making young men ready for marriage, while his associate Al Dammam, as a god o f marriage, stood for the fusion o f the ‘tw o bloods’: those o f the circumcision of the bridegroom and the hym en o f the bride. All these gods and goddesses and many others functioned in their different capacities, undisturbed in the vast pan-Arabian pantheon, until the strangest o f all appeared in the local mythology: Yahweh, who hailed from the volcano o f Jabal Alhan, the ‘mountain o f the gods’ in northern Yemen. At one time, the original hom e territory o f Yahweh was devastated by an enormous flood, forcing many people to migrate northw ards into the Hijaz. O ne consequence o f this migration, it seems, was the introduction o f the Yahweh cult to the Hijaz, w here the volcanic Medina region could have provided a second hom e base for this fiery god. In the books o f Genesis and Exodus, we have, preserved between the lines, a record o f the mythological career o f Yahweh as he set out to establish his dominance over the pan-Arabian pantheon. In a tribal society, such as that o f ancient Arabia, it was only natural to conceive o f the gods as a tribe of divine beings (the Beney ha-Elohtm), not unlike hum an tribes. From the outset, however, Yahweh stood apart from this ‘tribe o f the gods’. While others consorted freely w ith m ankind to produce races o f demigods and giants, Yahweh maintained a splendid aloofness, refusing to contaminate him self w ith the innate weakness o f humanity. According to m yth, he w ould not permit ordinary people even to approach him or see his face. Even those to w hom he chose to be especially ‘gracious’ and ‘merciful’ were only allowed a fleeting glance o f his ‘back parts’ (Hebrew ’hr, cf. root and derivatives o f Arabic ’hr, ‘end, bottom , behind’, Exodus 33:23). A m ong his devotees, Yahweh, with his eccentric habits and unpredictable moods, was conceived as the creator o f the universe and everything in it, which to his followers gave him an original

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pre-eminence over all other divine beings. As a mountain god whose original hom e was on the volcanic ridge o f Jabal Alhan, Yahweh could readily be identified w ith other mountain gods, such as El Shaddai and El Elyon. It was a different matter, however, w ith other deities o f the Arabian pantheon. A special m ythology was elaborated to explain how Yahweh, in his determination to establish himself as the supreme god, and ultimately as the O ne God, robbed these other deities o f their special powers and prerogatives by invading their territories, trespassing over their preserves, pitting them against one another, or playing on their individual weaknesses. Thus, for example, he reduced the gods o f life and knowledge to trees in a sacred grove guarded by the cherubim, w ho were his ow n priests. The god o f prudence and subtlety was turned into a crawling serpent; the goddess o f m otherhood into a real w om an, subject to man, condemned to bear his offspring in pain; the god o f human settlements into an actual hum an settlement; the god o f stability into the hulk o f an ark; the god o f torrential floods into a cloud; the god o f the seasons into a rainbow in that cloud. In time he came to be identified as El Roi, the god o f seeing, while assuming at the same time the functions o f the god o f hearing. He also trespassed on the realm o f fertility, claiming it as his ow n — on one occasion, by hitting the god A1 ‘U qbah (Biblical Jacob) on the sinew o f his hip, the repository o f his generative powers, which left him forever limping. The whole clan o f fertility gods and goddesses, represented by Abu Ruhm (Biblical Abraham) and his extended family, were ultimately depotentized and transformed into ordinary hum an beings — the eponymous ancestors o f different Arabian tribes carrying their names. Once his trium ph over the pan-Arabian pantheon was complete, this one-time volcano god, w ho formerly announced his terrible but invisible presence w ith fire, blinding smoke and earthquakes, underw ent a complete transformation. He now emerged, unrivalled, as the Elohim or supreme God o f Absolute Being, w ho reportedly chose for himself the name Ehyeh, literally ‘I am ’ (Exodus 3:14). As the supreme God o f Being, he remained invisible, elusive and unapproachable. His existence, however, permeated all creation. It was this transformed Yahweh, intolerant o f the worship o f any other deity, w ho became the O ne God o f Moses and the prophets — the God o f the Bible, whose com m andm ents and pronouncem ents were to be the recognized law and ethics o f the universe for all time. 166

The Man Who Saw It Happen

T he prehistory o f Israel O ur experiment w ith the Torah has not only yielded a rich fund o f information on the pagan origins o f the cult o f Yahweh, from which Judaism and Christianity, in turn, ultimately developed as world religions. From our restudy of the Torah stories in the light o f Arabian geography, w e have also learned a great deal about the origins o f the ancient Israelites o f Arabia — the historical people to whose genius we ow e the Bible. Israel was originally the name o f a Canaanite-speaking ‘H ebrew ’ tribe o f shepherd folk inhabiting the coastal hill country o f Asir in the Qunfudhah hinterland, whose special god was apparently El Elyon. These original Israelites, and other related tribes o f the region, considered themselves to be descended from a com m on ancestor, or ‘exalted father’ (’b rm, or ‘A bram ’). O ther West Arabian folk also claimed their ‘exalted fathers’, or ‘A bram s’, including the native inhabitants o f the Wadi Bishah basin in inland Asir, who worshipped El Shaddai; also the originally Aramean Jacob cattle folk o f the Zahran highlands in southern Hijaz, w hose god was Yahweh. Some time in the nineteenth century BC, if we accept the testimony o f the book o f E x o du s,1 coastal Asir was hit by a severe famine, forcing the H ebrew Israelite inhabitants to migrate inland and settle in the vicinity o f Ghithan (Biblical Goshen), on the western side o f the Wadi Bishah basin. The local shepherd folk worshipped El Shaddai, and the Israelite immigrants apparently merged w ith them. In any case, the god o f the Hebrew Israelites, El Elyon, came to be identified with the Wadi Bishah god El Shaddai. Wadi Bishah then, including the Ghithan vicinity, formed part o f the Egyptian colony o f Mizraim, whose capital, in the upper reaches o f the valley, survives by name as the village o f Misramah, near the modern city o f Khamis Mushait. An Egyptianized Hebrew, originally called Joseph (or so it is said), had risen to high office in Mizraim under the Egyptian name Zaphenath-paneah. While this Zaphenath-paneah lived, the Israelite settlers in the land o f Ghithan could thrive under his protection. 1. Exodus 12:40-41 states that the Israelites lived in the land of Mizraim for 430 years. Granting that the Israelites left Mizraim in 1440 BC (chapter 8), they would have originally arrived to settle in Mizraim in 1870 BC. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, there is no reason to doubt the date.

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In time, however, the situation changed. As the Israelites in Wadi Bishah grew in number, the Egyptian colonists began to regard them as a threat. Beginning w ith the middle decades o f the fifteenth century BC, the colonists took measures to curb the grow ing pow er o f the Israelites, placing them under strict supervision and setting them to forced labour, building cities and tending fields — the sort o f menial w ork which pastoral folk have always considered particularly repugnant, much as bedouins do to this day. At that time, an Israelite w ho is only remembered by his honorific title ‘Moses’, meaning the ‘redeemer’, entered the scene. This Moses had been raised as an Egyptian, was deeply involved in the contentious internal politics o f Mizraim, and naturally sought a pow er base am ong his own Hebrew people. When his political ambitions in M izraim were somehow frustrated, he decided to lead his people out o f the Egyptian-held Wadi Bishah, to establish them as an independent political com m unity under his leadership in Central Arabia, between the Yamamah region and the oasis o f Dabatayn, in Najd. The Egyptians had established the colony o f Mizraim with the express purpose o f securing the trade o f Egypt with South and East Arabia, and were determined not to perm it the Israelites access to Central Arabia. They did not w ant the Israelites to become a thorn in their side, by controlling the vital trade routes w ith the East Arabian coastlands. At first, they refused to allow the Israelites even to leave Wadi Bishah, as their labour was badly needed. W hen finally persuaded to let the Israelites go, the Egyptians insisted that they had to migrate not eastwards to the strategic Yamam ah region, but northwards to the Hijaz, a safe distance away, with little possibility o f causing trouble or harm. Having secured Egyptian permission to leave, the Israelites, still determined to move into the Yamamah region, made a final bid to reach there by way o f the oasis o f Khamasin in Wadi al-Dawasir. When the Egyptians barred their exit, they turned southwards to attempt another crossing to the Yamamah from Wadi Habuna. The Egyptians tried to bar their exit by that route too, but a flash flood in that valley destroyed their forces. The Israelites hailed the event as divine intervention in their favour, and set out now from Wadi Habuna to the wasteland o f Bahr Safi (the Biblical Yam S u f which is not the ‘Red Sea’). From this point, they decided to proceed no further in the direction o f Central Arabia, realizing that the Egyptians

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were still determined to prevent them from reaching that area. They had successfully defied the Egyptians by making an exit in that direction; this was a sufficient triumph. N ow wisdom dictated that they should m ove elsewhere. In the Appendix, the course o f the Israelites in their forty-year migration is followed in West Arabia step by step. After their exit to Bahr Safi from Wadi Habuna, they turned southwards, then back in the direction o f the west, crossing the Y emen mountains to attempt a settlement in the coastal Jizan region. The northern Yemen, as already noted, was the homeland o f the volcanic god Yahweh. As they passed, the Israelites apparently witnessed a spectacular eruption of the volcano ofjab al Alhan, where Yahweh was thought to dwell. Highly impressed by the experience, they readily adopted Yahweh as their god, identifying him with their own El Elyon, w hom they had earlier identified w ith El Shaddai during their long stay in Wadi Bishah. Thus, while w e find Yahweh identified by name as Elyon in D euteronom y 32:8-9, we read the following in Exodus 6:2-3, where for the first time the secret is given away: And God said to Moses: ‘I am Yahweh. I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob as El Shaddai; by m y name Y ahweh I did not make myself know n to them. ’ Having descended into the Jizan lowlands from the Yemen mountains, the Israelites were forced to flee onwards due to the stiff resistance to their settlement by the people of Amalek (the Biblical ‘tnlqy, or ‘Amalekites’, from ‘mlq — today the village o f the Jizan region called M a‘aHq (m ‘lq)). So the Israelites turned northwards. Passing through the hill country o f coastal Asir to the Zahran lowlands, then m oving uphill, they crossed the escarpment into the Zahran highlands. Here, for the first time, they came into direct contact with the Aramean Jacob folk o f the tribe o f Judah (chapter 7), who were old Yahweh worshippers, as the Hebrew Israelites had recently become. W ith the devotion to Yahweh as a common bond, the Jacob and Israel folk lost little time before agreeing to enter into a confederation under the leadership o f Moses, thus forming the people o f ‘All Israel’ (kl ysr’l, first mentioned in D euteronom y 1:1). O ne day a careful restudy o f the relevant passages o f the book of

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Numbers may reveal exactly how this confederation o f ‘All Israel’ was negotiated and actualized between the Jacob and Israel folk. For the mom ent, all that can be asserted is that the Biblical term ‘All Israel’ has a special historical significance. It does not simply denote all the people o f Israel. It refers specifically to the confederation established under Moses in the fortieth year after the exodus, between tw o different ethnic groups, the Jacob folk and the Israelites, whose initial bond was the com m on worship o f Yahweh. Balaam: the m an w h o saw it happen One witness to the historical act o f union between the Jacob and Israel folk in the Zahran region was Balaam, whose story is told in the book o f N um bers, chapters 22-24. In his time this Balaam, apparently a devotee o f Yahweh, was a renowned practitioner of divination and charged substantial fees for his services. He came from the Qasim area, which borders the T aif and Medina regions from the east, where the village o f Bil'am (bl‘m) still carries his name (Biblical bl‘m, standard contraction o f the Arabic ab al-'amm, ‘father o f the people’) — probably not his personal name, but a designation by which members o f a local dynasty or cult o f divines used to be known. Balaam, in his ow n w ords (Numbers 23:7), said that he came from Aram (Vm), from the hill country o f Q edem (qdm). In chapters 4 and 7, Aram, as the land o f the Biblical Arameans, has been identified as the inland territory o f the Hijaz, between T aif and Medina, including the region o f Qasim. This territory actually comprises the basin o f the upper course o f Wadi al-Rimmah (rm, cf. Vm, or ‘A ram ’) and its branching tributaries. The ‘hill country of Q edem ’ (Biblical hrry qdm , traditionally taken to mean ‘eastern m ountains’, or ‘mountains o f the east’) is none other than the Qasim region itself, where the Jadhma (gdjn) folk are still to be found (see p. 131). The king o f Moab, a certain Balak, sent after Balaam, we are told, ‘to Pethor, w hich is near the river, the land o f his kinsfolk’ (ptwrh ’sr ‘I nhr ’rs bny ‘mw, 22:5, the expression Vs bny ‘mw here meaning clearly ‘the land o f his kinsfolk’, not ‘the land o f A m aw ’, as in some m odern translations). The Pethor (ptwrh , essentially ptr) in question would be the present oasis o f Tarafiyyah (trp), on the ‘river’ or ‘water-course’ (nhr) o f Wadi al-Rimmah, w hose different tributaries meet in the Qasim region. The village o f Bil‘am, which

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still carries Balaam’s name, is found in the same vicinity. The story o f how this Balaam, originally commissioned to pronounce curses against the people o f Israel (22:6), was forced by Yahweh to announce favourable oracles instead, can be read as related in the book o f Num bers. It bears no relevance to the argument of this chapter. W hat is im portant, however, are his four preserved oracles, which distinguish no less than six times between ‘J acob’ and ‘Israel’ (Numbers 23:7, 10, 21, 23; 24:5, 17), in one particularly revealing case also speaking jointly o f ‘Jacob and Israel’ (23:23), thus clearly indicating that tw o different groups o f people were involved in the Israelite union. T w o o f these oracles, as we read them in the Bible today, bear the clear marks o f later redaction. There are references in both to a ‘king’ or ‘sceptre’ rising from Israel (obviously King Saul o f the Israelite tribe o f Benjamin); and one predicts the ultimate political dominance ofjacob in the confederation (an equally obvious reference to King David o f the Jacob tribe o f Judah, who rose against Saul and replaced him, thus becoming the founder of the dynasty o fju d ah injerusalem). Those are ex post facto predictions, interpolated into the original text o f the oracles o f Balaam at a much later time. Nevertheless, they are equally relevant for the present argument. At the time w hen Balaam is introduced on the Biblical scene, the career o f Moses was already nearing its end, and the Israelites had reached the final stages o f their wanderings, having arrived in the Zahran highlands and ‘settled in the plains o f Moab, from Eber to the ridge o f Jericho’ (my translation o f 22:1, w-yhnw b-‘rbwt m w ’b m -‘br l-yrdn yrhw, which readers knowledgeable in Biblical Hebrew may compare w ith the standing translations). In The Bible Came from Arabia, I identified the Biblical land o f Moab as the stretch o f the Hijaz highlands lying south o f Taif, including parts o f the Zahran region. Jericho (yrhw), in that area, is the present Warakh (wrh ), at the north-eastern end o f the Zahran highlands, while Eber (my read­ ing o f ‘br) is Ghabar (gbr), a village o f the Ghamid highlands which are adjacent to the Zahran region from the south. Almost midway between W arakh and Ghabar lies the village o f al-Musa (see Appen­ dix) where, on the first day o f the eleventh m onth in the fortieth year after the exodus, Moses rose for the first time to address ‘All Israel’ and communicate to them, in a long discourse, ‘all that Yahweh had given him in com m andm ent to them ’ (Deuteronomy 1:1 — 3f.).

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Regardless o f the explanations cited in the book o f N um bers as to w hy Balaam, who was originally commissioned by Balak king o f M oab to curse Jacob and Israel, decided to bless them instead, it appears to me that he was actually one o f the bards w ho were invited (and in his case handsomely paid) to attend the festivities marking the formation o f the Jacob-Israel union and pronounce favourable oracles. In tribal societies, the establishment o f a confederation such as that o f ‘All Israel’ is a m om entous occasion which calls for extended celebrations. Here is w hat Balaam said on the occasion, in four separate oracles (Numbers 23:7-10, 20-24; 24:3-9, 15-19, translations reconsidered throughout): a.

From Aram Balak, the king o f Moab, has brought me; from the hill country o f Qedem: ‘Come, curse Jacob for me; come, denounce Israel!’ H ow can I curse those w hom God has not cursed? H ow can I denounce those w hom Yahweh has not denounced? From the tops o f the mountains I see him, from the hills I behold him ... Who can count the crowd o f Jacob, and num ber the clan o f Israel?1

b.

Behold, I have received a com m and to bless: [Yahweh] has blessed, and I cannot revoke it. He has not observed wickedness in Jacob; nor has he seen evil in Israel: Yahweh, his God, is with him, and the signal o f a king is in him ... For there is no sorcery against Jacob; no divination against Israel.

1. Traditionally, the Hebrew ‘pry'qb and rb‘ysr’l have been taken to mean the ‘dust’ (Arabic ‘pr) ofjacob, and the ‘fourth part’ (one sense of the Arabic rb‘) of Israel. Here, however, the actual equivalent of the Hebrew ‘pr is the Arabic gpr, meaning ‘crowd, multitude’. The Hebrew rb‘, on the other hand, is equivalent to the Arabic rb‘ not in the sense of ‘fourth part’, but in that equally attested sense of ‘extended household, family’, i.e. ‘kin group, clan’, as distinct from the nuclear family or household. 172

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N o w it shall be said o f Jacob and Israel: ‘What a w ork o f G od!1 Here is a people! As. a lioness it rises up, and as a lion it lifts itself; it does not lie dow n until it devours its prey, and drinks the blood o f the slain!’ c.

H ow fair are your tents, O Jacob; your encampments, O Israel! Like valleys that stretch afar; like gardens beside a river... Blessed be every one w ho blesses you; cursed be every one w ho curses you!

d.

The oracle o f Balaam son o f Beor... The oracle o f him w ho hears the words o f God, and knows the knowledge o f Elyon, seeing the visions o f Shaddai... I see him, but not now; I behold him, but not nigh: a star shall come forth from Jacob, and a sceptre shall rise out o f Israel... By Jacob shall dominion be exercised, and the survivors o f cities be destroyed!

In these four oracles, Balaam not only speaks separately o f ‘J acob’ and ‘Israel’, but refers to the Israelite confederation as ‘Jacob and Israel’. He also makes reference to God (in the archaic Semitic form ’/ rather than the evolved Hebrew ’Ihym) by three names: Yahweh, Elyon and Shaddai (in the case o f Shaddai, twice, the other instance, unquoted above, being in the second oracle, in 23:4). W hat his oracles actually celebrate is not only the union o f ‘J acob’ and ‘Israel’ in the confederation o f ‘All Israel’, but also the formal recognition o f their three original tribal gods — El Elyon, El Shaddai and Yahweh — 1. This is my translation of the Hebrew mh p'l 7; literally ‘what God has made’. What is in question here is an idiomatic expression of approbation, as I believe it should be translated. An Arabic equivalent, still in regular use, is ma sha' Allah, which literally means ‘what God has willed’, but is actually used to mean ‘how wonderful!’

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as being the O ne God Yahweh for all. The oracles o f Balaam are an invaluable historical document, the contents o f which can only be appreciated in the light o f the sort o f analysis o f the Torah stories presented by this book. Initally we have a bard, invited to participate in the celebration o f a wedding between tw o different peoples who decide, at a particular m om ent in history, to become one folk. As in any traditional Near Eastern wedding, he sings the praises o f the tw o parties to the union, invoking blessings, and prophesying every future success. As the bridegroom pays the bard, he therefore normally sings his praises before the praises o f the bride. In the wedding o f the Aramean ‘J acob’ and the H ebrew ‘Israel’, the bard was an Aramean not a Hebrew, and probably ‘Jacob’ paid him. Thus, Baalam recognized ‘J acob’ as the bridegroom, and ‘Israel’ as the bride who had been brought to him from afar by divine providence. In all four o f his oracles, while lavishing praise on both, he made a point o f singing the praises o f ‘Jacob’ before those o f /‘Israel’. Balaam knew which party, in the end, was going to pay his fee. ★ ★ ★ ★ As this book is not a history o f ancient Israel, it will not trace the story o f ‘All Israel’ further. What we have established are the broad lines o f Israelite prehistory, as preserved in the books o f the Torah. Nevertheless, a general remark on the subject o f ‘All Israel’ may be in order. In any tribal confederacy, relations between the com ponent tribes — particularly the major ones — are bound to be tenuous. In the confederacy o f ‘All Israel’, the Israelite tribes and the Jacob folk (the latter as the tribe or people o f Judah) remained tw o separate entities. N o w and then, they w ould come together to face a com m on enemy or make a territorial conquest; otherwise, they were rarely, if ever, o f one heart and mind. M ore than three centuries after Moses addressed ‘All Israel’ for the first time in the Zahran highlands, Saul, from the Israelite tribe o f Benjamin, established an Israelite kingdom which included Judah. His authority, however, appears to have been only reluctantly accepted by the Jacob folk o f Judah. Before long David, w ho came from the tribe o f Judah, rose to challenge him and, ultimately, to replace him, first as king o f Judah, then as king

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of ‘All Israel’ (2 Samuel 5:5). David’s kingdom o f ‘All Israel’ was bequeathed to his son Solomon. After Solomon’s death, however, the endemic tensions between the Jacob and Israelite folk within the confederacy quickly reasserted themselves. The unity o f the kingdom of ‘All Israel’ broke down, to be replaced by the rival kingdoms o f ‘Judah’ and ‘Israel’. While H ebrew was the official language o f both kingdoms, Aramaic continued to be understood and spoken at least by the ruling classes o f the kingdom o f Judah, in their capital, the West Arabian Jerusalem o f the Asir highlands. The officials o f Judah, it seems, spoke Aramaic am ong themselves w hen they wished to keep their deliberations secret. Thus, when Jerusalem was besieged by the Assyrians at one time, officers o f the kingdom o f Judah went out to parley and asked that negotiations between the tw o sides be conducted in Aramaic, indicating to the Assyrians that they understood that language. They made a point o f requesting that the ‘J ewish’ (i.e. Hebrew) language should not be used in the talks, which were held in public, lest the com mon people standing nearby should understand w hat was being said (2 Kings 18:26). Serious religious differences also remained between Judah and Israel, although both sides accepted Yahweh as their God, and the law o f Moses as their canon. In post-Biblical times, and even to this day, the religion o f ‘All Israel’ continued, and to some extent continues, in tw o branches. O n the one side are the ‘J ew s’ (yhwdym , or yhwdyym), whose name actually means the ‘Judah people’. O n the other, we have communities such as the Samaritans w ho make a point o f calling themselves Beney Yisra’el (bny ysr’l), or ‘people o f Israel’. Perhaps such communities are remnants o f the original Israel branch o f the confederacy o f ‘All Israel’. One thing remains certain: the Samaritans accept the books o f the Torah, which include the com mandm ents o f Yahweh as articulated by Moses for ‘All Israel’. However, they do not accept the other books o f the Hebrew Bible, which belong to the tradition of Judah alone, and are not considered part o f the shared tradition of ‘All Israel’.

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A m ong the stories o f the H ebrew Bible, the tale o f Jonah is unique in tw o respects. First, its hero is a prophet to w hom no oracles are attributed; second, it is the only Bible story which has a distinctly marine setting. W ho was Jonah? What was his real story? Where did he come from? As already noted in the Introduction, the book o f Jonah, as it is found in the H ebrew Bible, is a text probably composed in Mespotamia as late as 350 or even 250 BC. As in the case o f other Bible texts, it was no doubt based on earlier sources or traditions. The book, as we shall see, cites a num ber of place names, all of which are preserved unchanged from the original version o f the Jonah story. The author o f the book, it seems, had no idea where these places were; he simply gave their names as he had heard or read them. To make his story meaningful to the Mesopotamian Jewish readers, he made a point o f changing only one name o f the original story, which he rendered as ‘Nineveh’, the name o f the capital o f the old Assyrian empire, in northern Iraq. From the other place names, which he failed to alter, and which in some cases he did not even recognize as being place names, the original geography o f the story can be fully reconstructed. The fact that Jonah really existed as a person is beyond question. Apart from featuring in the book o f Jonah as the hero o f the story o f the reluctant prophet w ho is swallowed by a big fish, then vomited alive, the same man (in both cases called ‘Jonah son o f Amittai’) is also spoken o f as ‘a servant o f Yahweh, God o f Israel’ in 2 Kings 14:25. In

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this text it is simply stated that he was a person from a place called Gath-hepher, w ho prophesied a territorial extension o f the kingdom of Israel — an extension which actually took place, exactly as he had prophesied, during the reign ofjeroboam II (c. 786 - c. 746 BC). Here we not only have the necessary evidence about the historicity o f Jonah; we also have an indication about his place of origin and the period o f his prophetic activity — the middle decades o f the eighth century BC at the latest. Jonah’s prayer The book o f Jonah preserves the text o f a prayer taken to have been uttered by Jonah from the ‘belly of Sheol’ (btn s’wl), understood to mean the belly o f the whale that swallowed him. The text o f this prayer, I believe, is authentic. It cites a number o f unsuspected place names which help establish the geography of the Jonah story, and I would translate it as follows (Jonah 2:2-9): I called from Zorah (srh) to Yahweh, and he answered me; From the valley (btn) o f Sheol (s’wl) I cried for help, and you heard m y voice. You cast me from Zolah (swlh) into the heart o f the seas, and vastness1 surrounded me; all your breakers and waves passed over me. I said: ‘I am cast from before your eyes; how can I look again upon your holy temple?’ The waters threw me out onto the same coastland;2 weeds were round about me, wrapped to m y head. 1. Hebrew nhr (nahar), translated ‘river’, is meaningless in this context. In Arabic, however, the same word, which with one vocalization (nahr) means ‘river’, is attested with another vocalization (nahar) to mean ‘vastness’. 2. Hebrew ’ppwny ‘d nps thwm. For my interpretation of the Biblical term thwm, or tehom, see The Bible Came from Arabia, pp 76-78. The Arabic thm, vocalized as taham, also carries the sense of ‘land descending to the sea’; E.W. Lane, Arabic-English Lexicon (London, 1863-74), I, p. 320. The Hebrew ’ppwny, from ’pp, is attested in Arabic in the sense of impatient rejection; hence the Arabic expression uff (’pp), to mean ‘begone!’

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I went dow n to the extreme parts o f the mountains: the land o f Riheyah (rhyh)\ afterwards to O lam (b-'dy l-‘wlm );* and you brought m y kinsfolk up from Shahat (shtj2 0 Yahweh, m y God! In m y despair,3 I remembered Yahweh: my prayer came to you, to your holy temple. Those w ho serve the idols o f Shave abandon their fidelity. I, with the voice o f gratitude, sacrifice to you what I have vowed; 1 complete it: may its goodness be for Yahweh! From this prayer, as I have retranslated it from the original Flebrew, we learn the following: 1. Jonah experienced a disaster at sea. 2. In his despair, he made a vow to offer a special sacrifice to Yahweh. 3. The survivors o f the disaster were washed ashore onto the same coastlands from which they had set out on their journey. 4. Jonah himself had set out on his journey from a place called Zolah. 5. Either before or after the disaster, he had twice successfully 1. Hebrew w-t'l m-sht hyy, usually rendered ‘Yet thou didst bring up my life from the pit’ (RSV). Here, the Hebrew hyy (contruct of hy with the first person pronoun) is better interpreted to mean ‘my tribe, kinsfolk’ (Arabic hy, vocalized hayy), rather than ‘my life’. For sht as a place name, see below. 2. Here, the problematic Hebrew b-‘dy, in my opinion, must be interpreted in the sense of the Arabic ba'd (contraction of b-‘d, literally, ‘in the going beyond’), meaning ‘afterwards’, ‘beyond’. 3. Hebrew b-ht'tp ‘ly npsy, literally ‘In the languishing of my soul over me’. The usual translation, ‘When my soul fainted within me’ (RSV) is untenable, because the Hebrew ‘ly means ‘over me’, not ‘within me’.

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invoked the assistance o f Yahweh in prayer: once at Zorah, and another time in the valley o f Sheol. 6. From the place where he was washed ashore, Jonah made his way to a region o f mountains, first to Riheyah, then to a place called Olam. 7. His kinsfolk came up from a place called Shahat to meet him. 8. Jonah completed his vowed sacrifice to Yahweh, apparently upon his arrival at O lam , and his prayer was composed to celebrate the occasion. 9. While he sacrificed to Yahweh, others broke faith and served ‘the idols o f Shave’ — the implication being that those were fellow Yahweh-worshippers w ho had experienced the same disaster and made the same vow o f sacrifice to Yahweh, but broke their faith by offering their sacrifices to the ‘idols o f Shave’ instead. There is no m ention o f a ‘big fish’ in the words o f Jonah’s prayer. Had he been swallowed upon falling into the sea by such a ‘fish’, perhaps a sperm whale, he would not have lived to compose his prayer. There actually exists a record o f a man who fell into the sea and was swallowed by a whale, which his companions pursued and killed. W hen they recovered his body from the whale’s belly, his chest was crushed, and the creature’s gastric juices were already working upon the corpse. An investigation o f the possibility o f a man entering the belly o f a dead sperm whale convinced the investigators that any person would be dead before reaching the stomach, let alone surviving there for any length o f tim e.1 Still, one cannot rule out the possibility that Jonah could have had an accident w ith a large fish at sea, which left him virtually unharmed. In the Koranic version o f the story (Koran 37:142-144), the fish certainly takes him in by the m outh (Arabic iltaqama, ‘make a mouthful o f , not necessarily implying actual swallowing). The Koran simply adds that had he not been a true believer, he would have stayed in the belly o f the fish forever. In the chapter o f the Koran that actually carries the name o f Jonah (10:21-23), no fish are mentioned. The story indicates that some people were sailing with a fair w ind at sea w hen a tempest broke out. As the waves rolled 1. Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Philippe Diole, The Whale: Mighty Monarch of the Sea (London, 1972), pp. 134-135, with reference to the study of whales by Egerton Y. Davis. 181

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over them, they beseeched God to save them. God thereupon intervened, and they were rescued, but failed to show their gratitude. In fact, they proceeded to behave abominably. This is exactly what Jonah himself points out about his travelling companions in his prayer: after being saved, they showed infidelity by serving the idols o f Shave, instead o f participating in the sacrifice to Yahweh. Clearly, w hat we have in the Koran is a correct account o f the historical event. O ne can easily perceive how it came to be assumed that Jonah uttered his prayer ‘from the bowels o f the fish’ (m-m'y h-dgh, Jonah 2:2). In the text o f the prayer, Jonah says that he cried for help from the ‘valley o f Sheol’ (m-btn s ’wl). Because the H ebrew btn, as a com mon noun, means ‘belly’ (in Arabic it also means ‘valley’), the phrase m-btn s’wl was understood to mean ‘from the belly o f Sheol’, and the enigmatic Sheol was taken to be a reference to the fish, or perhaps its n am e.1 It is possible that the whole story o f Jonah’s three-day stay in the belly o f the fish was originally woven out of the misinterpretation o f this one phrase from the preserved text of his prayer — a text rendered verbatim in the book o f Jonah, which was a w ork o f much later composition. T he evidence fro m the b ook o f Jonah In the book o f Jonah, we have additional information about the man and his career. Here is a synopsis o f the story, with the additional information included: 1. Jonah son o f Amittai (ywnh bn ’mty) was asked by Yahweh to go to the ‘great city’ (h-'yr h-gdwlh) o f ‘N ineveh’ (nynwh) and denounce her wicked ways (1:1-2). 2. Unwilling to undertake this mission, Jonah ‘went dow n’ (yrd) 1. Sheol features in other Biblical passages as the name of the place where the dead go — a sort of underworld. For the Sheol of Jonah, see below. The other Sheol could have been an ancient West Arabian necropolis. The name survives in different parts of West Arabia as Shawla’, Shawalah (both swl), Sayil or Sayilah (both syl). One, Al Sayilah (7 syl, the ‘god of the underworld’?) is a village of the Najran valley. If the Biblical s’wl is equivalent to the Arabic syl, meaning ‘flow’, said of a torrent or flash flood (hence Arabic sayl, meaning ‘valley of the torrent, flood’), the biblical concept of the world of the dead would be that of the gorge of a torrent, which would make sense.

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to Joppa (ypw ) and found a ship going to Tarshish (trsys ); so he paid his fare and w ent aboard (w-yrd bh) to go ‘with them ’ (' m-hm ), away from the presence o f Yahweh (m-l-pny yhwh, 1:3). T w o things are implied here: first, Tarshish was a distant place reached from Jonah’s home country by sea; second, Tarshish lay (or was imagined by Jonah to lie) outside the realm or reach o f Yahweh. 3. At sea a m ighty tem pest broke out which threatened to wreck the ship. To lighten the craft, the mariners threw its cargo overboard; then they cast lots to determine which person was responsible for the calamity befalling them. The lot fell on Jonah, w ho identified himself as a ‘bry — norm ally taken to mean ‘H ebrew ’, but possibly, in this case, meaning the native o f a place called ‘hr. He confessed his guilt through his disobedience to Yahweh, and suggested that he be throw n overboard so that the tempest would subside. After all attempts to row the ship back to shore had failed, Jonah was finally throw n into the sea, as he him self had suggested, and the tempest was stilled. Thereupon a ‘great fish’, specially appointed by Yahweh, swallowed Jonah; he remained ‘in the bowels o f the fish’ (b-m‘y h-dg) three days and three nights (1:4 - 2:1). Here again, two things are implied. First, the ship going to Tarshish was a trading vessel carrying cargo, w ith no passengers other than Jonah (at least, no other passengers are mentioned, only ‘mariners’, Hebrew mlhym). In the Koranic version o f the story, it is actually specified that the ship was a ‘vessel laden w ith cargo’ (Arabic jiilk mashhiin). Second, the sea where the ship sailed was one in which ‘great fish’ capable o f swallowing people (i.e. whales) were found. 4. After three days w hen the fish finally vomited Jonah on dry land, Yahweh came to h im a second time and asked him to go to ‘N ineveh’ to proclaim to its people that their city was going to be destroyed in forty days. This time Jonah was prom pt in obeying (3:l-3a). Here the H ebrew text adds, as I read it: ‘Nineveh was a great city, to Elohim, a journey o f three days’ (w-nynwh hyth ‘yr gdivlh l-’lhym mhlk slst ym ym , hitherto taken to mean ‘Nineveh was a great city to God (l-’lhym), a journey o f three days’, which makes awkward sense). Jonah ‘turned rou nd’ (w-yhl ) to enter the city, which made his journey from Elohim take four days (3:3b-4a) instead o f three.1 What is implied is that Jonah went to ‘N ineveh’ from a 1. In usual translations, ‘Jonah began (u’-yhl) to go into the city, going a day’s journey’ (!) (RSV). This translation takes so many liberties with the 183

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place called Elohim (’Ihym , not to be translated here as ‘G od’), and that the journey took him four days (a marching distance o f about 120 kilometres). 5. When Jonah prophesied in ‘Nineveh’ that the city was going to be destroyed in forty days, its inhabitants, w ho ‘believed in G od’ (w-y'mynw b-’lhym), proclaimed a fast and put on sackcloth. The ‘king’ o f the city ‘arose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself in sackcloth, and sat in ashes’, ordering his people to ‘cry mightily to G od’ to spare their city. The city was actually spared, to the disappointment ofjonah w ho had left it and was waiting nearby to ‘see what would becom e’ o f it. It is clearly implied in the story that the king and people o f ‘N ineveh’ believed in the same God as Jonah. Like him, they worshipped Yahweh (3:4b - 4:5). 6. Jonah was disappointed because his prophecy concerning the destruction o f ‘N ineveh’, at Y ahw eh’s urgent request, did not happen, thus discrediting him as a prophet. T o console Jonah, Yahweh pointed out the terrible consequences o f destroying a city ‘in which there are m ore than a hundred and tw enty thousand persons... and also much livestock (bhmh rbh)’ (4:11). From this, it is clear that the ‘N ineveh’ o fjo n a h was a city much o f whose wealth was in livestock. In fact, the king o f the city, w hen he asked his people to ‘cry mightily to G o d’ to spare its destruction, enjoined them to go on a fast, so that ‘neither man nor livestock (bhmh), cattle (bqr) or sheep (s’n) taste anything’ (3:7). The ‘N ineveh’ o f the story must have been the principal market city o f a rich pastoral region. Surely, Jonah’s ‘N ineveh’ as a city o f ‘livestock’, ‘cattle’ and ‘sheep’ was not the Assyrian Nineveh o f northern Iraq, which in the eighth century BC was the capital o f a military empire o f much more varied wealth. The people o f the Assyrian Nineveh were certainly not Yahweh-worshippers. So far, it has been assumed that Jonah went to this Nineveh from Palestine, where his Joppa (ypw) was Jaffa (Yafa, or y p ’). Had this been the case, he w ould not have been able to reach the Assyrian capital in four days using a roundabout route. The distance between Palestine and northern Iraq is about Hebrew original that I find it grossly misleading. Actually, the Hebrew yhl means ‘turns round’. For the identification of Elohim as a place name, see below.

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1,400 kilometres by the shortest route, which would take the better part o f three m onths to cover on foot, or by mule or camel, without making any stops. Before we can hope to discover the actual location ofjonah’s ‘N ineveh’, we must first determine where he came from. The g eograp h y o f the Jonah story Jonah’s country was located by a sea w ith a known whale population. This sea could hardly have been the Mediterranean, into whose waters whales rarely stray. O n the other hand, it could easily have been the Arabian Sea, where whales abound. After all, the ambergris which was first gathered off the shores o f South Arabia, and which is indispensable in the manufacture o f expensive perfumes, is a secretion o f the sperm whales swimming in the waters o f the Indian Ocean, o f which the Arabian Sea forms a part. In the Indian Ocean, the sperm whale is only found in the winter season, w hen the waters o f its summer home in the Antarctic are frozen. For Jonah to have had an accident involving a whale in the Arabian Sea, he w ould probably have been travelling in winter. In the Indian Ocean, this is the season o f the north-east monsoons, when traditional seafaring along the coast of South Arabia moved from O m an in the north-east, by way o f Dhofar, to the Yemen in the south-west. The sum m er season, which is that o f the south-west monsoons, would have been the time o f the return journey from the Yemen to Dhofar, and from there to Oman. O n this basis, we may assume for a start that Jonah’s hom e base, and the port from which he set out on his sea journey, was in Oman. This is no more than a guess, the evidence so far being in no way conclusive. Jonah, however, was reportedly travelling towards Tarshish when his ship was hit by the tempest. To Biblical scholars Tarshish has long posed a problem. Guesses about its location have varied widely between Tartessus in Spain, Debaia el-Shrirah in southern Tunisia and different suggested locations in the Red Sea basin and elsewhere. I am personally convinced that the Biblical ‘Tarshish’ (trsys) was actually an ancient nam e for coastal Dhofar, where a village called Sharshltl (srsyt) is still to be found. T hroughout history, the harbours o f Dhofar have been im portant stations for South Arabian maritime commerce, the country itself being, in a special way, the land o f the famed South Arabian frankincense. In the Middle Ages, the harbour city o f Dhofar, whose ruins can still be seen outside the present city

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o f Salalah, enjoyed w orld fame as a leading market for the ‘spices’ coming from the different countries o f the Indian Ocean basin. To determine whether or not Jonah had set out for ‘Tarshish’ from Oman, rather than the Yemen, or perhaps coastal Asir or the Hijaz, we have to identify all the place names in his story — among them, possibly, Amittai. As the ‘son o f A m ittai’, Jonah need not have had a father called Amittai; he could have come from a place by that name. In Biblical H ebrew , as in Arabic, one can be the ‘son’ o f a place as well as o f a parent. I have examined all parts o f Arabia, and other parts o f the N ear East, for the place names cited in the book o f Jonah. With the exception o f ‘N ineveh’ they are only found collectively in O m an. According to 2 Kings 14:25, as already noted, Jonah son o f Amittai came from a place called Gath-hepher (gt hpr) — I would say the ‘hill country’ (Arabic^?, from the ro o t gtt;) o f Hepher (hpr). From joshua 19:13, we learn that this Hepher, and another place called Kazin (qzyn), were located ‘to the east (qdmh), towards' the sunrise (mzrhh)'. In Arabia, no region lies further ‘to the east, towards the sunrise’ than O m an, where the place names cited in the Bible in connection with the career o fjo n a h can still be found to this day (for the locations, see map p. 178): 1. Amittai (’mty): Imtl (’mty), tw o villages by the same name. 2. Hepher (hpr): Hafra (hpr). 3. Kazin (qzyn): Ghizayn (gzyti). 4. Joppa (ypw): A f t (’p y). 5. Zolah (swlh): Zulah (zwlh). 6. Zorah (srh): Sur (sr). 7. The ‘valley’ (btn) o f Sheol (s’wl): the valley o f Wadi Sal (s’l), where there is actually a village called Batin (btn, meaning ‘valley’), and another nearby called Abu Yunah (ywnh) — none other than the name o fjo n a h (Biblical ywnh). 8. The ‘land’ o f Riheyah (rhyh): Harah al-Rihl, literally the ‘settlement’ o f Rihi (rhy). 9. O lam (' wlm): ‘U lam (7m). 10. Shahat (sht): Shahhah (shh, or sht). 11. Shave (sw ’): Shaya’ (^y’)12. Elohim (' Ihym ): Al H aym a (exactly 7 hym), the name o f a village and a mountain ridge in the same location.

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O n the ship, Jonah reportedly identified himself as being a ‘bry — here not a ‘H eb rew ’, but the native o f a place called ‘br. This, on a purely linguistic basis, could have been the present tow n o f ‘Ibri ('bry), in inland O m an. The coordinates ofthejon ah story, however, point to the tw o villages called today Ghabarah (gbr, linguistically the exact equivalent o f the Biblical ‘br), each o f them near one o f the two villages called Imtl, or ‘Amittai’. Usually, in regions where the economy is largely pastoral, as is the case o f O m an and other parts o f Arabia, the presence o f sets o f villages o f the same name in areas not too far apart reflects the com mon practice o f transhumance, already referred to in chapter 7. That Y ahweh-worshipping communities, such as the one to which Jonah belonged, should have existed — even flourished — in O m an in Biblical times, at a considerable distance from the West Arabian land o f Israel in Asir, is not at all surprising. The worship o f Yahweh could have reached O m an from Asir at an early time, either as a result o f Israelite migrations there, or by missionary preaching. T hroughout kno w n history, migrations between West and East Arabia, as well as regular commercial relations by land and also by sea, are regularly attested. It must be observed that in 2 Kings, Jonah is not spoken o f as a ‘prophet o f Israel’, which would have made him a native West Arabian Israelite. Rather, he is spoken o f as a ‘servant o f Yahweh, the G od o f Israel’ w ho came from Gath-hepher — the land described in the book o f Joshua as being in the extreme east, towards the rising o f the sun (see above). The indication is clearly that he did not belong to the native folk o f the West Arabian Israel, but to a com m unity from elsewhere which happened to worship the God o f Israel. The real story Having established the obviously O m ani setting o fth e jo n a h story, we can easily reconstruct the events o f the tale. Jonah came from the village o f Im tl (Amittai), near Ghabarah (‘br), in the hill country o f Hafra (Hepher), on the coastal slopes o f the O m an mountains west o f the seaport and m odern capital city of Muscat. He and his kinsfolk led a life o f transhumance, moving their residence seasonally between coastal and inland Oman, where another Imtl stands near another Ghabarah, and where two villages called ‘U lam (Olam) and Shahhah (Shahat) are also located. Jonah was at Zulah (Zolah), near

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the Imtl and Ghabarah on the maritime side o f O m an, when he decided to go by sea to ‘Tarshish’. So he ‘w ent d o w n ’ by way o f the valley o f Wadi al-M u‘awil to Afi (Joppa), to book passage on a cargo ship with a sea captain w hom he knew there. He then proceeded dow n the same valley to reach present-day Birka, where he turned eastwards, passing through Sib (today the M uscat airport), and boarded his ship in one o f the Muscat creeks — the only good harbours in that part o f the country. From Muscat, his ship began to coast its way eastwards, to make a right angle turn at Ras al-Hadd and proceed along the South Arabian coast to ‘Tarshish’ or Dhofar. Jonah’s ship, however, was destroyed by a violent tempest before reaching Ras al-Hadd. The survivors o f the shipwreck managed to reach land (the ‘same coastland’, or nps thwm) at the harbour o f Sur (Zorah), where Jonah invoked Yahweh to guide him and his party safely home. From Sur, the travellers crossed the mountains inland to Wadi Sal (the Beten o f Sheol), where Jonah invoked the help of Yahweh again — probably in the village o f Abu Yunah (the ‘father’, or ‘god’ o f Jonah), which still carries the prophet’s name in its exact Biblical spelling. Leaving Wadi Sal, the travellers headed north-w est in the direction o f the Izki region o f inland O m an, where Jonah had relatives living in the village o f Shahhah (Shahat), close by the local Im tl and Ghabarah which also belonged to his folk. There Jonah stopped at the village o f ‘U lam (Olam), and his relatives arrived to meet him. At ‘U lam (Hebrew ‘wlm, the ‘everlasting’, one o f the epithets given to Yahweh in the Bible), there appears to have been a sanctuary dedicated to Yahweh which was considered particularly sacred — the ‘holy temple’ o fjo n a h ’s prayer. The prophet, now reunited with his relatives, proceeded to make a burnt offering to Yahweh, in completion o f the vows he had made at Sur and in Wadi Sal, and perhaps also earlier at sea. His fellow travellers, however, did not stop at O lam w ith him to complete their vows to Yahweh. Instead, they moved further on to the ‘Ibri region, to offer their sacrifices there to the ‘idols’ o f w hat is today the village o f Shaya’ (Shave). W hy did Jonah undertake his journey to Dhofar, which ended in disaster and was never completed? Perhaps Jonah was not fleeing the face o f his god, but as a ‘servant o f Y ahw eh’, he had intended to undertake a preaching mission there — a mission which was never fulfilled. U pon his safe return home, the prophet settled for a time

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in A1 Hayma (Elohim), about 60 kilometres east o f ‘Ulam. He then resumed his missionary w ork nearer home, in ‘N ineveh’, which was only a march o f three days away — about 90 kilometres by the shortest route. Jonah took a roundabout route, reached the city in four days, and proceeded to announce its im m inent destruction because o f the wickedness o f its people. W hat was this ‘N ineveh’, which was so clearly in Oman? From Al Hayma, a three-day journey could have brought Jonah to Nizwah, the largest and historically the most im portant tow n of inland Oman. By a detour into the Izki region, w here the prophet had relatives, the jo urney w ould have taken him four days. In the tow n o f Nizwah, the livestock o f a rich pastoral area has traditionally been traded, including sheep (s’n), cattle (bqr) and pack animals (bhmh), such as the special breed o f asses o f the neighbouring Jabal al-Akhdar. I am convinced that the ‘N ineveh’ o f the Jonah story was none other than this Nizwah. The author o f the book o fjo n a h , I would say, took the name ‘N izw ah’ (nzwh) and changed it to ‘Nineveh’ (nynwh, essentially nnwh) by the alteration o f one consonant — the change o f the z in ‘N izw ah’ to the n in ‘N ineveh’. He was writing his story for M esopotamian Jews familiar with ‘N ineveh’, which was still a thriving city between the fifth and third centuries BC, as it was to be for centuries to follow, when the book o fjo n a h was written. O n the other hand, few M esopotamian Jews at the time would have been able to tell where N izw ah was. As it turned out, Jonah’s prophecy o f the destruction o f ‘N ineveh’, which I shall take to be Nizwah, failed to happen. This was probably the turning point in his career. Discredited as a prophet in his home country, Jonah had good reason to decide to leave O m an. N ext we find him in the land o f Israel, in West Arabia, where he made the prophecy concerning the extension o f the territory o f the kingdom o f Israel. His words eventually proved true, and in consequence he gained some renowm — enough to secure for him a passing mention in the annals o f Israel. A m ong the Israelites, however, w ho had know n a number o f great prophets, Jonah was n o t fully accepted. To them, he was no more than an outlandish ‘servant o f Yahweh, God o f Israel’ w ho came from the distant hill country o f Hepher, in the extreme east. O ne question remains to be asked: was it only the misreading of the expression btn s’wl (the ‘valley o f Sheol’) in the text o f Jonah’s

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prayer — his only surviving words — that gave rise to the legend o f his three-day sojourn in the belly o f the whale? In the w orld o f the Indian Ocean, many such stories m ust have been told, first because whales are found in abundance in that ocean; and second, because these monstrous creatures have always been the object o f fascination. If the story o f Jonah belongs to the w orld o f the Indian Ocean basin on its Arabian side, there is a similar story that comes from the Indian side, and the tw o stories are no doubt m ore than geographically related. In the Indian story, the ancient hero Saktideva goes searching for the Golden City, is swallowed at sea by a fish, then disgorged intact. Is it possible that the story o f this Saktideva was picked up one time in O m an and w oven into the story o f the local prophet called Jonah? O r was it the story o f some hero o f O m ani legend, perhaps called Jonah, that was picked up in India and woven into the legend o f Saktideva and his search for the Golden City? The story is certainly the same one. W hat is not possible to determine is w ho borrow ed it from w hom . However, one thing remains certain: there was a historical prophet from O m an called Jonah w ho lived in Biblical times and experienced a sea disaster at some point in his career. He could even have had an encounter w ith a whale on that occasion. O n the other hand, Jonah the prophet was surely not the original hero o f the ancient legend about the man w ho stayed alive in the belly o f a fish.

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The territory o f the Egyptian colony o f Mizraim (present day Misramah, near Khamis Mushait) must have comprised the whole Wadi Bishah basin. The H ebrew shepherd folk of Israel were settled in the land o f Goshen (gsn) — today the village o f Ghithan (gtn), in the Balqarn hill country, west o f the lower course o f Wadi Bishah (chapter 6). In the same Balqarn region, these Hebrews (Exodus 1:11) were put to forced labour to build two store cities for the Egyptian colonists, called Pithom (ptm) and Raamses (r‘mss), the name o f the second city being a construct referring to a shrine for the Egyptian god Ra (r‘) in a place called Meses (mss). The tw o store cities in question are today the local villages o f Al Futaymah (ptym ) and Masas (mss). When the H ebrew Israelites, under the leadership o f Moses, decided to leave the territory o f Mizraim (chapter 8), the Egyptians forbade them to m ove inland into Central Arabia, towards Zebotham (‘I sb’tm, 6:26; 12:51), hitherto taken to mean ‘by their hosts’ (RSV), but actually the village o f Dabatayn (dbtyn). They were willing, on the other hand, to let them go north towards the Hijaz, by way o f the land o f the Philistines (plstym, 13:17, from pish) — today Falsah (pish), in the K hath'am hill country, directly north o f the Balqarn region. The H ebrew Israelites, however, were determined to attempt an exodus to Central Arabia. This is what they did: From a gathering point in the Balqarn region at Masas (Raamses), they first m oved south, and uphill, to Succoth (skt), today Al Skut (skt) in the adjacent hill country o f Bani ‘Amr. From there, they

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descended to Wadi Bishah by way o f one o f its tributaries, Wadi Rlmah (b-yd rmh, 14:8, hitherto taken to mean ‘w ith a high hand’). Their plan was to head first for H am ushlm (hmsym, 13:18), hitherto translated ‘equipped for battle’ (RSV), which is today the oasis tow n o f Khamasln (hmsyn ) in Wadi al-Dawasir. From there, they could have directly reached Dabatayn (Zebotham), in Central Arabia. The Egyptians, however, were already pursuing them in that direction (14:8). So the H ebrew Israelites turned southwards from Khamasln to Wadi Habuna (the Biblical Yad Hazaqah, or valley o f Hazqah, which is the name o f one o f the local villages), encamping in the heights south o f that valley in a location described as b-‘l spn (14:2) — not ‘Baal-zephon’ (b‘l spn), as traditionally rendered, but ‘above’ (ib-‘l) a place called Zephon (spn), today the village o f Safan (spn). This Zephon faced Pi-ha-hiroth (py h-hyrt, the ‘m o u th ’ o f Hiroth), today probably the village o f Al Harah (hrh, or hrt), in the same vicinity. Both Zephon and H iroth are Biblically described as located between Migdol and the Yam (h-ym, usually rendered as ‘the sea’) (14:2). Migdol (mgdl) appears to refer to the present village ofM aqlad (tnqld) in Jabal Faifa, at the headwaters o f Wadi Habuna. As for the Yam, it is none other than the pastoral desert o f Bilad Yam, fringing Wadi Habuna from the east. When the Egyptian forces reached the valley o f Wadi Habuna, they were overtaken by a flash flood which took a heavy toll o f them (chapter 8). The Israelites waited for the flood to subside, then made a swift descent from their encampment at Safan (Zephon) to Hazqah, in Wadi Habuna (b-yd hzqh, ‘by Wadi H azqah’, not ‘by strength o f hand’, as in the standard translations, 13:3, 14). From there, they made their exit to Yam Suf (ym swp, 15:22) — not the ‘Red Sea’, nor the ‘Sea o f Reeds’, as usually rendered, but the desert o f Bahr Safi (in Arabic, literally, the ‘sea’ o f Safi, or sp, see chapter 8). From there they proceeded in the direction o f Shur (swr, 15:22), today Shari (sr), in the desert valley o f Wadi Khubb, about 120 kilometres south o f Wadi Habuna. For three days they went without water. When they reached Marah (mrh, 15:23), today M urrah (mrh) in Wadi Khubb, they found its waters too bitter to drink. The name o f this place, in its Biblical as in its present Arabic form, actually means ‘bitter’. Before their exodus from Wadi Bishah, the Egyptians had made it clear to the Israelites that they could not proceed to or settle in

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Central Arabia, ‘not even by way o f Wadi Hazqah’ (w-V b-yd hzqh, 3:19). The Israelites had made a point o f moving out o f the land o f M izraim by that route, in defiance o f the Egyptians; but now they decided to press their luck no further. Hence they moved south to Wadi Khubb, to take the road from there which crosses the Yemen highlands to the Jizan region. In that region, their first stop was Elim (’ylm, 15:27) — today al-Yamiyah (’l-ym ), in the valley o f Wadi Dhabhan. N ext they proceeded to the ‘wilderness’ o f Sin (syn), today Sin (syn), downhill from al-Yamiyah in a southerly direction. This ‘Sin’ lay ‘between Elim and Sinai’ (16:1), the coordinates being correct. The Sinai (syny) in question is today Wadi Sayan (syn) in the northern Yemen. The Israelites, reportedly, reached this ‘Sinai’ in the third m onth o f their wanderings (19:1). It was there that they apparently witnessed an eruption o f the volcano o f Jabal Alhan (19:16), which made them adopt the local volcano god Yahweh as their god (chapter 8). The H ebrew Israelites m ight have settled in the Jizan region and the adjacent parts o f northern Yemen, had their reception been more friendly. They had hardly reached Rephidim (rpydym, 17:1), today Radfayn (rdpyn), at the edge o f the Jizan coastal plain, when the people o f neighbouring Ma'alTq (m‘lq) — the Biblical Amalek (‘mlq) — came out to fight them (17:8f.). U p on first arriving to encamp outside Radfayn, the Israelites had found no water to drink (17:If.); thereupon Moses reportedly took his rod and struck water for them out o f the rock o f H oreb (hrb, 17:6). The Horeb in question is today the village o f Habarah (hbr) in the same vicinity. Moses, it is said, called the place Massah (msh) and Meribah (mrybh) (17:7). There is no ‘Massah’ to be found in that location now, but there is certainly a ‘M eribah’ — today the local village o f MarabI (mrb). At this point, the report o f the trek o f the Israelite wanderings becomes confused, mainly because o f similarities in place names. The very fact that the place where Moses struck water out o f the rock is given three different names in the same context points to this confusion. M oreover, while ‘H oreb’ can be the Habarah o f the Jizan region, it can also be either o f the tw o Haribs o f the Yemen (see chapter 8), one south-east, the other south-west o f a ‘M eribah’ which is the historical and present Maarib (Ma’rib, or m ’rb). O n the other hand it can be the Harib (hrb) o f coastal Asir in the hinterland o f Q unfudhah. There one finds not only a ‘Meribah’ (this one MaribI,

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also mrb), but also a ‘Massah’, which is Hillat M aswa (the ‘settlement’ o f msw). Faced with stiff resistance in the Jizan hinterland, the Israelites, it appears, lost no time in turning northw ards to establish a temporary settlement for themselves around this second ‘H oreb ’ o f coastal Asir and the ‘Massah’ and ‘M eribah’ o f its neighbourhood. H ow long they remained there is not clear. At this point, the book o f Exodus ceases to relate their wanderings and turns instead to speak o f the laws given to them by Moses. In N um bers 10:11-12, there is a hint that the Israelites had already moved to the wilderness o f Paran (see below) ‘on the twentieth o f the second m onth o f the second year’ o f the exodus from Mizraim, which w ould mean that their stay in the Qunfudhah hinterland was no more than a matter o f months. N ext (Numbers 11:3), we find them at Taberah (tb'rh , archaic noun derivative o f the verbal root b‘r) — today Ba‘arah (b'rh , also noun derivative o f b‘r), a village which controls one o f the main passes across the Asir escarpment into the Zahran highlands o f the southern Hijaz. From this point on, the narrative o f the wanderings is resumed. Having crossed the Ba‘arah (Taberah) pass into the Zahran highlands, the Israelites proceeded first to Kibroth-hattavah (qbrwt h -t’wh, N um bers 11:34), then to Hazeroth (hsrwt , 11:35). As a place name, Kibroth-hattavah means the ‘graves’ (Hebrew plural o f qbr) o f h-t’wh (t ’wh preceded by the definite article). The place in question, in the Zahran highlands, is today Q ub ur (Arabic plural o f qbr, also meaning ‘graves’), near the village o f Taw! (twy, cf. t’wh). As for Hazeroth, it could refer to a num ber o f places there — m ost probably the densely-forested ridge o f Jabal Khudayrah (hdyrh , or hdyrt). From this ‘H azeroth’, the Israelites proceeded to the wilderness o f Paran (p’rn, 12:16): today the nearby ridge o f Jabal Faran {pm), where an oasis by the same name is to be found. From the Zahran highlands, Moses led the Israelites further north into the Taif region. His trek in this direction is described in detail in The Bible Came from Arabia (p. 207, n. 5), and the account need not be repeated here. Once the H ebrew Israelites had arrived in the Zahran highlands, however, they were already in the territory o f the Ya'aqlb (chapter 7) — the Aramean Jacob people o f the southern Hijaz, among w ho m the tribe o f Judah was the m ost prominent. Here, for the first time, the tw o peoples became fused into one folk — that o f ‘All Israel’ (chapter 9). The place where the terms o f the

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Appendix: Geography o f the Exodus

confederation were concluded was most probably the village called today al-Musa, which actually carries the name o f Moses in its Arabic form. It was here, apparently, that Moses rose to make a formal address to ‘All Israel’ for the first time. For the identification o f the coordinates o f the place, as given in Deuteronomy 1:1, see The Bible Came from Arabia, p. 204, n. 8. Thus, in West Arabia, the full trek o f the exodus and wanderings o f the Israelites under the leadersip o f Moses can be retraced, dow n to the last given detail (see map p. 140). This is sufficient to establish their historicity. So far, the same Israelite wanderings have not been successfully retraced between Egypt and Palestine, and this for a perfectly understandable reason: historically, the wanderings occurred elsewhere.

195

»

Index

A aro n 142, 145, 152-5, 158 A bel 29, 30, 37-9, 41-3, 56 A b e l-m iz ra im 115,116 A b h a 40, 55, 84, 103, 107 A b ra h a m 25, 75-94, 95-106, 110, 121, 163, 166, 169 A b ra m 75-94, 95-7, 143, 167 the A ra m e a n 78-82, 89-94, 95, 99, 104, 127, 129, 131, 134, 137, 152 o fB e e rs h e b a 89-91, 93-4, 95-7, 102-3, 131 o f G enesis 15 79, 82-91, 93, 95, 148, 165 the H e b re w 76-8, 82, 89, 90, 91, 93, 95, 100, 103, 110, 127 o f th e Y e m e n 92-3, 95 A b u Q aslb 135 A b u R u h m 95-7, 100, 103, 121, 163, 166 A b u Y u n a h 186, 188 A d ah 40 A d a m 25, 29-30, 42-43, 47, 48, 66 A d a m a h 146-7 al-A d am ah 59 ‘A d an see A d en ‘A d an ah 30, 32, 35, 38, 39, 43 A d en 43 al-‘A d h ra 84, 87 A d o n is 119, 121 A d u lla m 135

AfT 186, 188 A frica 49, 107 A gad e 70, 71 A i 79-81, 89 A k h e n a to n 141 A k k ad 70, 71 A k k ad i 70 A lb rig h t, W .F. 71 A llo n -b ak u th 131-2 Al ‘A lyan 163 A lyanah al-D ul 132 A m alek 169, 193 A m alekites 169 A m ittai 177, 182, 186, 187 A m o n (E gyptian god) 109 A m o rites 85 A m ra n 142, 152-5 Al ‘A m rin 152 ‘A naq ah 109 A nas A llah tribe 42-43, 48 A ner 76 A nu bis (E gyptian god) 109 A nukis (E gyptian goddess) 109 ‘A q ab at M azhak 99 A rabia, the exo dus to C en tral 158-61 W est 1 3 ,1 6 ,2 1 ,2 3 , 55, 7 1 ,7 3 , 96, 97, 105, 107, 109, 115, 118, 125, 141, 149, 153, 157, 169, 182 n .l , 189, 195 A rab ian Sea 117, 185

197

Index A rabs 15, 23 A ram 170, 172 A ram ean folk 129, 134, 135, 152,155 A ram eans 71, 170 A ram -n ah araim 80, 81, 98 A rarat 52, 56, 58 m oun tain s o f 51, 52 ‘A rb a ’ 99 A r e b 99 A rm enia 51 A rpachshad 92 A rsaphes (E gy ptian god) 109 ‘A ru 92, A sa f (god) 120 A senath 118 A sir 11, 21, 30, 32, 33, 35-6, 40, 41, 43, 56, 56, 70, 72, 84, 86, 87, 90, 91, 93, 97, 100, 103, 104, 105, 107, 109-11, 116-17, 118, 120, 124, 129, 134, 136, 144, 145, 147, 149, 157-9, 163, 167, 169, 175, 186, 187, 193, 194 A ssyria 70 A ssyrians 175 A tad 115-16 A to n (E g y p tian god) 109, 141 A to n A rsaphes 141 A to n H o ru s 141 A tu m (E g yptian god) 109 A y ar 80 Al A y n a y n 56

B an! H ajar 103 B a n ija d h m a folk 131 B ani M alik h ighlan ds 71-2 B am Sar 102 B ani S h ah r hill c o u n try 40 B anu H ajar trib e 103 B anu Y u s u f tribe 110-11 B aram (god) 82-7 Al B aram 165 B aridah 102 B ashar (god) 55-9, 164 Al B ash ar 55 B asharah 55 B asharat 55 Al B ashir 55 B athan 122-4 B atllah 14, 89, 134 B atin 186 B eer-lahai-roi 90, 99, 1 0 1 ,1 0 2 -3 ,1 0 5 B eersheba 89-91, 101, 103, 115, 131 B eitin 14 B eney h a -E lo h lm 165 B eney Q e d e m 131 B en jam in 114 trib e 171, 174 B eor 173 B ered 102 B ethel 14, 79-82, 89, 91, 131, 133-4 B eth leh em 134, 137 B ey t h a-S o h a r 123 B ilad Y a m 159, 192 B il'a m 170 B ilhah 129 B irka 188 B rin k m an , J. A. 71 Al B u -H atalah 36 B u rm 93, 94 B u rm a h 78 B u tay lah 14, 81, 89, 91, 131, 134 B u w alah 40-1 B u w a y la h 40-1

B aal-zepho n 160, 192 B a'arah 194 B abel, T o w e r o f 25, 63-73, 137 B ab-ili 66 B ab y lo n 68-71 B ahr Safi 158-9, 160, 168-9, 192 B ak aw iy y at 132 B alaam 25, 170-4 B alak 170, 172 Balal 66-9 Al Balal 72, 73, 164 B allasm ar reg io n 116 B alqarn reg ion 115, 159, 191 B ani ‘A m r hill c o u n try 191

C ain 29, 30, 37-43, 56 folk 30, 39-41 C an aan, la n d o f7 9 , 9 3,100 , 110, 111, 114-7, 129, 130, 133-4

198

Index C anaan (son o f H am ) 60-2 C anaanites 60, 61, 85 C h ald ea 70-1 C haldeans 71 C h erith , b ro o k o f 22 C hezib 135, 137 C hina 45 C h n u m (E g y p tian god) 109 C hozeba 137 C u sh 14, 156 D a'alim ah 135 D ab atay n 158, 168, 191, 192 D afin ah 131, 132 D ah h ak 163 D am ascus 83 D am eseq E liezer 82-4 Al D a m m a m 149, 165 D ath an ah 115 D av id , K ing 10, 171, 174-5 D ay, Jo h n 13 Al D a 'y a 33, 35-6, 164 D ebaia el-S hrirah 185 D h a h ra n 103 D h a h ra n al-janub 40, 90, 91, 96, 97, 103 D h a t M isk 84 D h o fa r 185, 188 D h u A w an 118 D im a sh q , see D am ascus D o th a n 112, 115, 117, 119 D o zy , R ein h art 10

E lim 193 E lo h im (o fjon ah ) 183-4, 186, 189 E lo h im 24, 25, 87, 146, 166 E lo h im , M ou n t 145-50 El E ly o n (god) 76, 163, 166, 167, 169, 173 E m e rto n , Regius P ro f e s s o rjo h n 15, 16 E n a im 136 E n o c h 40,48 E n o sh 42-3, 48 E p h ra im 110 E p h ra th 134 E p h ra th a h 137 E r 135, 137 E sau 98, 100, 104-6, 110, 120, 133, 164 E shcol 76 E u p h rates river 68, 69, 70 E v e 25, 29, 31, 34-5, 37, 42, 164 Falsah 159, 191 Faran 91 al-F ar‘ayn tribe 111 Fardah 136 Al Fari‘ 97, 122, 125 Al Farw an 91 F atih 109 Al F ira'ah 97, 122, 125 F irt 86 Freud, Sigm und 141 F u rat 86, 134, 137 Al Futaym ah 191

E ber 75, 92-3, 171 folk 75, 92 E den, g arden o f2 9-35, 38, 39, 42, 43, 164 E d o m 100, 133 E d o m ites 104 E g y p t 12, 49, 107-11, 122, 124, 139, 141, 157-61, 168, 195 E g y p tian s 107-9, 118, 122, 141, 159-60, 168-9, 191-3 Eleazer 154 Eliezer 84, 87 Elijah 15, 22

G ath-hepher 179, 186, 187 G eb o r folk 33-4 G erar 90, 98 kin g o f 90, 91, 97 G e rsh o m 145 G h ab ar 171 G habarah 187-8 G h am id highlands 171 Al G harfbah 105 G h ay y 89 G h ith a n 115, 159, 167, 191 G hlzayn 186

199

Index G h u n n a m 136 Gib eon 14 Gilead 117 Gilead, M o u n t 132 Gilgamesh, Epic o f 45 G irgashites 85 G o m o rra h 77 G oshen, land o f 115, 117, 159, 167, 191

H e b re w folk 118, 135, 157 H e b re w Israelites, see Israelites H e b ro n 16, 77, 78, 91, 93, 100, 110, 112, 127, 129, 133 valley o f 100, 115 H e p h e r 186, 187, 189 H ijaz 10, 21, 40, 49, 50, 53, 55-6, 70-1, 80-2, 89, 90, 91, 93, 94, 97, 99, 103, 105, 107, 110, 118, 120, 129, 130-1, 136-7, 146, 152, 155, 159, 165, 167, 168, 170, 171, 186, 191, 194 H ilai tribe 49 H illah 68 H illa t-M a sw a 194 H im y a r d y n a sty 52 H in ak trib e 49 H irah 135 HTrah 135 H iro th 192 H it 69 H ittites 85 H iy ay 147, 149 H o b a b 156 H o r, M o u n t 153-5 H o re b 144-6, 194 ro ck o f 193 H o ru s (E g y p tian god) 109 H u b al 38, 42 Al H u say k ah 105, 121

H ab arah 193 H a d ra m u t, valley o f 10 H afra 186, 187 H agar 88, 90-1, 102-3 folk 103 H ail reg io n 53, 70 H a m 47, 48-50, 60-1 folk 49-50, 60 H a m u sh lm 192 H an ak ah 40 Al H an lsh ah 35-6, 164 H an lt 132 H a n o th 132 Al H arah 192 Al H arah 109 H arah al-R ihi 186 H aran (father o f Lot) 78 H aran 78-81, 131 H ar h a-E lo h lm 145 H arib 144-6, 193 H arib al-G haram lsh 145-6 H a rsh a f 109 Al H aru 109 H ashem 33-4 Al H a sh im 34 Al H a w a ’ 71-2 H a w d al-M u sh ay t 40 H a w ra n 92-3, 152-3 Al H ay ah 32, 55-6 Al H ay at 32-6, 164 Al H ay m a 186, 189 Al H ay y ah 35-7, 164 H azaqah, valley o f 157, 192 H azerm av eth 10 H azero th 194 H azqah 157, 192

Ibn H a b ib , M aslam ah 151 ‘Ibri 187, 188 ‘Id w ah 40 Im tl 186-8 ‘Inan 56, 59 A l ‘Inan 56-8, 164 India 107, 190 Indian O cean 73, 185, 186, 190 Irad 40 Al ‘Irad 40 Iraq 15, 68-71, 83, 177, 184 Al ‘Isa 105, 120, 164 Isaac 25, 87-8, 90, 98-106, 110, 121, 163, 169 the A ram ean 100, 127, 134, 137,

200

Index the H e b re w 100 Ishm ael 88, 90-1, 102, 165 the g o d 103 Isis (E g y p tian goddess) 109 Al Ism a‘11103 Israel (son o f Isaac) 100, 110-12, 114-15, 116, 121, 137, 171-5 the H e b re w 127, 129, 130, 133, 134-5, 174 Israel 15, 135, 141, 147, 154-5, 158, 159, 167, 170-5, 177, 179, 187, 189, 191 con federation o f 135, 137, 143, 152, 169, 170-5, 194-5 k in g d o m o f 179, 189 Israelites 10, 12, 21, 26, 60, 68, 69, 93-4, 97, 104, 117, 130, 134, 138, 139, 141, 143, 152, 158-9, 167, 168-70, 171, 175, 189, 191-5 Izki reg io n 188, 189

171-5 the A ram ean 127-38, 152, 174 folk 131, 137, 167, 169-70, 174-5, 194 the god 105, 111, 120-1, 127, 130 al-Ja‘dah 132 J a d a s 102 Jad h m a folk 170 al~Ja‘diyyah 117 Jafar, forests o f 50 Jaffa 184 Janabah 90, 91, 99 Jap h eth 47, 48-50, 60-2 folk 49-50, 60, 62 Jared 48 J a w f region 92 Jebusites 85 Jericho 171 Jero b o am I I 179 Jerusalem 13, 16, 24, 139, 171, 175 Jesus 119, 121-2, 148 Jeth ro 144, 145, 146, 151 al— Jib 14 Jib 'an 14 Jilla‘ad 117 Jizan region 122, 169, 193-4 Jo b 10 Jochabed 142 Jonah 23, 163, 177-90 Jopp a 183, 184, 186, 188 Jo rd an 115-16, 132 Joseph 25, 110-25, 159, 165, 167 the god 111-12, 120-5 the H ebrew 110-12 o f M izraim 111 tribe 110-11 Jubal 40-41 Judah 135-7, 152 kingdom o f 174-5 tribe 136-8, 169, 171, 174, 194 Junaynah 30, 32, 35-6, 38, 39, 164

Jaakan, th e w ells o f the p eo p le o f 153 Jabal 40, 41 Jabal A d im (M o u n t A dam ) 43 Jabal a l-A k h d ar 189 Jabal A lhan 146-8, 150, 151, 165, 166, 169, 193 Jabal A w r 80, 81, 94 Jabal BatTlah 132, 134 Jabal D irim 116 Jabal Faifa 36, 115, 118, 192 Jabal Faran 194 Jabal H ad! 144 Jabal H a rra h 153, 154 Jabal Ib ra h im 82 Jabal Jan ab ah 81, 99 Jabal K h u d a y ra h 194 Jabal Salm a 53 Jabal Shada 99 Jabal Sinjar 68 Jabal a l-T a n n u r 50 Jabal W afit 50, 62 Jab b o k , th e ‘pass’ o f 129, 133 Ja b r trib e 34 Jacob 25, 26, 98-101, 104, 106, 110-12, 127, 164, 165, 166, 169,

K adesh 102 K adm onites 85 K alada’ 71 Al K am il 40

201

Index K asad 92 K asdim , see U r K asdim K ashm ah 115 K azin 186 K enan 48-9 K enites 39-40, 85 K enizzites 85 K eturah 91 K haibar 49 K ham asln 158-60, 168, 192 K ham in 109 K ham is M u sh a it 40, 90, 91, 94, 101, 109, 110, 115-17, 122-4, 144, 156, 167, 191 K h a th 'a m hill c o u n try 191 K h a tm T a w l 107, 109 K hinas 109 K h irb an 77, 93, 110, 115, 129 K hTrin81, 131 K ho n s (E gyp tian god) 109 K ib ro th -h attav ah 194 K inanah tribal confederation 49 K Inor 41 K iriath -arb a 77-8 K u th ah 14 K u th ah 156 L aban 127, 137 al-L ahim 146 L am ech 40-1, 48 Leah 127 al-L iham 146 Al Lisan 72-3, 164 Lit 78 L ot 76-8 Luz 131-2, 134 M a'a llq 169, 193 M aarib 49, 193 M achpelah, cave o f 77-8, 100, 111, 115 M adln ah 144, 146, 156 M ahalalel 48-9 M ah an aim 132, 133 M ahn a 132, 133 M a k h ta m iy y a h 160

202

M alik trib e 49 M alo n 148 M a m re 76-8 M anasseh 110 M aqala 132 M aqfalah 77, 115-16 M aqlad 192 M aq ll 132 MarabT 193 M arah 192 M a ra w a h 81 MarlbT 193 M a rw a h 88, 89 M ary , V irg in 148 Al M a ry a m 152-3 M asarfr folk 103 M asas 191 M aso retes 15-16, 22-3 M asqa 124 M assah 193-4 M a y d a n 146-8 Al M ay lah 149, 165 M ay siriy y ah 153-4 M edina 70, 80-1, 94, 131 reg io n 49, 53, 118, 131, 146, 165, 170 M editerran ean 73, 185 M ehujael 40 M endenhall, P ro fesso r G eo rg e 10 M erib ah 193-4 M eses 191 M e so p o tam ia 45, 68-71, 81, 83, 177 M eth u selah 48-9 M eth u sh ael 40 M id ian 143-8, 154, 156-7 M ig d o l 192 M ily an 147-8 M in a 109 M in u (E g y p tian god) 109 M iq n eh 41 M iria m 152-5 M isr 102-3 folk 103 M isra m a h 9 0 , 91, 9 7 ,1 0 9 -1 0 ,1 1 5 -1 6 , 122, 124, 144, 167, 191 M izraim 90, 91, 97-8, 109-25, 134-5,

Index Al

139-61, 167-8, 191-5 riv er o f 85-6 M o ab 170-2 M o re h 79-81 M o riah , land o f 88 M o ritz , B. 71 M o se rah 153-5 M oses 25, 26, 139-61, 166, 168-70, 171, 174-5, 191-5 o f E lo h im 146-52, 153, 156 o fM iz ra im 143, 144, 146, 147, 149, 153, 156-61 the ‘red eem er’ 142-3, 148 son o f A m ra m 152-5, 156 M o sh e h 142-3 M u h a m m a d , p ro p h e t 151 M u h ay il 40-1 M u'rrah 192 al-M usa 149, 153, 171, 195 Al M u sa 149 M u sa y lam ah 151 M u sc at 187-8 al-M u sh 149 Al M u sh a y t 40

N firi 109 N im a s 32-3 N in ev eh 177, 182-6, 189 N iz w a h 189 N o a h 25, 45-62, 92, 164 o f A dam ah 59-62 the god 55, 57, 59 people 49, 50, 52, 59, 60 N o d , land o f 38-40 N u b ia n coast 107 O g a b 41, O h e l 41 O la m 180-1, 186, 187-8 O m a n 185-90 O n (Egyptian god) 118 O n a n 135, 137 O n n o p h ris (E gyptian god) 118 O siris (Egyptian god) 109, 118, 119 Pacific O cean 45 P addan 131 Paddan-aram 127, 132, 133, 137 Palestine 9-17, 21, 23, 26, 83, 116, 117, 139, 160, 184, 195 Paran, wilderness o f 91, 194 El Paran 91 Parfitt, T u d o r 14, 16 Peleg 92 Perat, river 85-6 Perez 136 Perizzites 85 P eth o r 170 Ph arao h 90, 97, 101, 113-5, 122-5, 142-4, 156-61 Philby, H .S t.J.B . 98, 101 Philistines 158, 159, 191 Pi-ha-hiroth 192 P ith o m 191 P o tip h ar 113, 115, 119, 122-4 P otiphera 118 P tah (Egyptian god) 109

N a a m a h 40-1 N ah a 49, 53 N a h a rin 81, 99 N a h a y in tribe 49, 53 N a h o r 75, 78, 81, 89, 92-3, 99 N a 'im a h 41 N a jd 41, 53, 168 plateau 52, 157 N a jra n 55, 182. n. 1 N a k h b a h 109 N a m ira h 77 N a r al-Y am an 146, 150 N aw afil 33 N aw afilah 33 N a w d a h 39-40 Al N a y lh 55 g o d 56-8, 164 N e g e b 79-81, 90, 91, 96, 99, 103 N e k h b e t (E g yptian goddess) 109 N e p h ilim 33 N e p ri (E g y p tian god) 109

Q ad as 146, 147 Q ararah 90, 97 Q a rn 116

203

Index Q a ry a t ‘A m ir 77 Q a ry a t ‘Asiyah 77 Q a ry a t al-Shiyab 77 Q a ry a t Al Sllan 77 Q asim region 132, 153-4, 170 Q a w 122 Q a w a h 122 Q a w s 56 Q a y n tribe 38, 39 Q ay s 56 Al Q ay s 56, 59 g o d 56, 58, 164 Q e d e m hill co u n try 170, 172 Q isa m a h 81, 129, 131, 134 QTshah 56 Q u b u r 194 Q u d sa n 81 Q u lfa t al-‘U d h r 149 Q u n fu d h a h hinterland 77-8, 93, 110, 115-16, 118, 129, 133, 167, 193, 194 Q u ra y n 41 Q u sh a h 56 Al Q u w a y s 56

El R oi (god) 102-3, 165, 166 R u y ah 90, 99, 102, 103, 105 Al R u y ah (god) 165 .Saadah 149 Sadeh 99 Al Sadi 96, 163 Safadah 109 Safan 160, 192 Al Sahah 99 Saktideva 190 Sal'ah (god) 35 Salalah 186 Al S a il 36 Salih trib e 49, 92 S am aritans 175 Al Sam i1ah 103 Sanaa 52, 92, 145, 146, 149 Al S a q r 109 Sarah 88, 90, 97-8, 99, 100, 101, 104, 110, 163 Al Sarah 97, 100, 163 Sarah high land s 97 Sarai 89, 90, 97, 102 Sarg on the G reat 70 Sarhah 136 Sauer, P ro fesso r Jam es 12-13, 16 Saul, k in g 171, 174 Sayil 182 n .l Sayilah 182 n .l Serug 92 Seth 29-30, 42-3, 48 S ha-an-kha-ra 68 S haba'ah 90, 94, 101, 103, 115 S haba'in folk 103 S ha‘b al-B aram 84 Shada ridge 99 El Shaddai (god) 96, 97, 163, 166, 167, 169, 173 Al Shaft (god) 72, 164 S hahat 180-1, 186, 187, 188 S hahhah 186, 187, 188 Al S h am 'ah 103, 165 S h a m a T l folk 103 S hara'in 71-2 Shari 192

Ra (E g yptian god) 109, 191 R a‘ 109 R a‘a tribe 92 R aam ses 191 R ab ig h 105 R ab qah 105 R achel 127, 134 R ad fay n 193 Ras a l-H ad d 188 R eb ek k ah 98-9, 104-5, 110, 164 R ed Sea 11, 49, 73, 84, 99, 1 1 9 ,1 5 8 , 160, 168, 185, 192 R ep h aim people 85 R ep h id im 193 R eu 92 R euel 143-4, 146, 154, 156 R iheyah 180-1, 186 Rijal Alma* hill c o u n try 40, 84, 86-9, 107, 115, 118, 134, 141 R im a h 159 R iyadh 41

204

Index SharshitT 185 Shatfah 41 Shave 180-2, 186, 188 Shawalah 182 n .l Shaw ariq 92 Al S haw iyah 109 Shaw la’ 182 n . l Shawlah 135 Shaya’ 186, 188 Sha'yah 135 Shayan 132 Sheba, land o f 10 Shechem 79-81, 112, 115, 129, 131, 134 Shelah 92, 135-7 Shem 47-50, 52, 60-2, 75, 92, 93 folk 49-50, 60, 62 Sheney 132 Sheol, valley o f 179-89 Shinar, land o f 63-72 Shln'ar 68, 71 Shingi-U ri 68 Shu (E g yptian god) 109 S h u a 135 S hu m m 49, 62, 92-3 Shur 102, 192 Sib 188 Silah 40 Sim eon, tribe o f 10 Sin 193 Sin, w ilderness o f 193 Sinai 139, 149, 193 M o u n t 149-50 Al Sk ut 159-60, 191 Sobk (E gyptian god) 109 Sodom 76-8 Sokar (E gyp tian go d) 109 Solom on 139, 175 Sopd (E gyptian god ) 109 Strabo 87 Suah 99 S u b k a 109 Succoth 159-60, 191 S udum ah 78 Sulubah 38, 41 Sum ayy tribe 50

S ur 186, 188 Syria 49, 69, 83, 92 T ab ah 53 T a b e ra h 194 T a if 11, 70, 72, 81, 131-2, 135, 153, 171 highlands 70-1, 72, 131 region 40-1, 72-3, 81, 99, 103, 1 3 2 ,1 3 5 -7 ,1 4 6 ,1 5 2 ,1 5 5 ,1 7 0 ,1 9 4 T a k h ir 93 T a m a r 135-6 T a m a r 135 T arafiy y ah 170 T arsh ish 183, 185-6, 188 T artessus 185 TawT 194 T e ra h 93 T h a b it tribes 55 Al T h a b it 55-6 g o d 55-9, 164 T h a b it al-B asharf trib e 55, 59 T h a t tribe 42-3 T im n a h 136 T o p e sh 41 T ran sjo rd an ian high land s 117 T u b a l 40-1 folk 41 T u b al-cain 41 a l-T u d 116 Al T u rn 109 T u m n a 136 T u w a y q hills 52, 58-9 ‘U b ra h 92-3 ‘U la m 186, 187-9 U m m L ahm 134, 137 ‘U q b a h 104 Al ‘U q b a h 105, 111, 120, 127, 130, 164, 165, 166 ‘U q u b 41 U r o f the C haldees (U r K asdim ) 79-81, 89, 93, 94 U r a t 52, 56, 58 U w a ra h 80 a l-‘U y a ’ 81, 89

205

Index Y a'aqib folk 194 al-Y a‘aq!b 131 Yafa 184 Al Y ahil 41 Y a h w e h o f Y ireh 88 Y a m am ah 56, 59, 157-60, 168 valley 52, 158 Al Y am anI 109 al-Y am iyah 193 Y a m S u f 159-60, 168, 192 Y a n if 109 Y ara’ 88-9 Y arfa trib e 92 Y asah 109 Al Y asir 109 Al Y azld 111, 165 Y em en 10, 11, 39, 40, 48-9, 50, 52, 59, 62, 92-4, 97, 145-7, 149-52, 159, 165, 169, 185-6, 193 high land s 42-3, 92-3, 169, 193 Y em en, N o r th 34, 40, 52, 92, 110 Y em en, S o u th 117 Y ireh 88 Al Y u s i f l l l , 120-1, 124-5, 165

W abil 116 W adi A d am 86, 132, 134, 136-7 W adi A d am ah 32-3, 35 W adi al-B atin 70 W adi B ishah 30, 32-3, 35, 36, 38, 39, 43, 90, 91, 93-4, 97-8, 99, 101, 102-3, 105, 109 -11,115-18, 144, 156, 158-61, 164, 167-9, 191-2 W adi al-D aw asir 158-60, 168, 192 W adi D h ab h an 193 W adi Falaqah 92 W adi H ab u n a 157-60, 168-9, 192 W adi H a m 50 W adi H a ru n 78 W adi H azqah 158, 192-3 W adi ‘Iyar 135, 137 W adi K anahbalah 41 W adi K h u b b 192-3 W adi K ilakh 71-2 W adi M aqniy ah 41 W adi M asram 86 W adi a l-M u ’aw il 188 W adi N a jra n 34, 50, 52, 110, 141, 149, 157 W adi N a w a n 135, 137 W adi Q ay in ah 40 W adi R anyah 91 W adi R Im ah 160, 192 W adi al-R im m ah 70, 71, 170 W adi Sal 186, 188 W adi Sayan 150, 193 W adi T a th lith 144, 146, 156, 160 W adi T u lab 41 W afiyah 124 W akid 70-1 W aqbah 129, 133 W aqld 70 W arakh 171 W ard tribe 49 W itn 109, 141 W itn Al H arah 141 W itn H a rsh a f 141 W u jay 'an 153

Al ZafTrah

149 Z a h ra n h ighlands 81, 89, 90-1, 99, 102, 129, 131-2, 134, 135, 137, 153, 154, 167, 169, 171, 174, 194 region 82, 131, 133, 136, 152-3, 155, 169, 170-1 Z a p h e n a th -p a n e a h 118, 120, 122-3, 167 Z e b o th a m 191-2 Z e p h o n 160, 192 Z e ra h 136 Z illah 40-1 Z ilp h a h 129 Z ip p o ra h 144, 148-9, 151, 156 Z o la h 179-80, 186, 187 Z o ra h 179, 181, 186, 188 Z u h a y r (god) 123 Al Z u h a y r 123 Z u la h 186, 187

206

The familiar Bible stories of Adam and Eve, Noah and the Flood, Moses and the Exodus, Jonah and the whale, will never be the same again. Kamal Salibi argues that these familiar stories can be coaxed into revealing their secrets only when seen in their proper setting Arabia. Did Adam exist? Is the story of the Flood rooted in Arabian mythology? Who was Abraham? Did the Exodus really begin in Egypt? These and other questions receive startling answers which are bound to re-open the furious debate which Salibis theory has unleashed. Salibi’s previous book turned history upside down with its astonishing claim - based on an analysis of Arabian place names that the Old Testaments true setting was not Palestine but western Arabia. His thesis provoked worldwide controversy. But Salibi is unrepentant. Far from retracting his theory, in his new book he takes it an important stage further through a re-examination of some of the best known Bible stories.

Kamal Salibi is a Lebanese historian. He is the author of many books, including The Bible Came from Arabia, The History of Modern Jordan and A House of Many Mansions: The History of Lebanon Reconsidered. He is currently Director of the Royal Institute of InterFaith Studies in Amman, Jordan.

£14.99 SAQI 26 Westbourne Grove

London W a 5RH www.saqlbooks.com